Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother’s Day!

Hello!  Today I wanted to share a very special message with you about how we create who we become.  My mother has passed, but she taught me a lot about becoming who I am.

Our mothers give us life and teach us who to become.

What are you? And where did you come from?  These are the two most common questions I can remember being asked on a daily basis as early as I can remember.  Attending my first days in elementary school, I knew I was different.  I grew up in a multi-racial family.  My mother was Caucasian and Latina, and my dad was Okinawan Japanese.  I grew up with a mixed American/ Hawaiian and Japanese culture sprinkled with doses of Latin culture in the mix.  Trying to explain it all right now seems like a qualitative research paper in a dissertation, but inside our home, it felt “normal”.  However, when I went to school, I noticed I didn’t look like other kids and they didn’t look like me.  I started to feel strange, self-conscious, and extremely insecure about the way I looked. And when people asked these two categorizing questions, it felt like discrimination.  It’s okay to be curious and ask, but honestly, who normally greets people like that when you first meet them?  I wanted to feel accepted, but I knew that this may not be possible, so oftentimes I spent time alone on my own.

As I grew up and time passed, I realized that this was going to be my “normal greeting” for the rest of my life.  I guess you can say that eventually I got used to being comfortable with being uncomfortable.  I also realized that in order to overcome this feeling of “otherness”, I had to start putting myself in other people’s shoes and start approaching this situation with a frame of mind from varied perspectives.   This experience is also what sparked my curiosity in learning about other people who were not like me in both lifestyle and culture.

See, looking or seeming different than the norm doesn’t have to seem scary and strange.  “Otherness” is just something we don’t yet understand.  However, I do think that “otherness” is something that needs to be understood.  For instance, my mother didn’t dress in heels and dresses like other mothers did when I was growing up.  She actually wore jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers, and didn’t wear makeup.  She didn’t look at all like my other friend’s mothers.  It was a bold move at that time.  She wanted to feel comfortable being herself and have confidence in who she was.  This quality is something that I have always admired in my mother, and I will never forget this about her.

My mother also had a skin condition called vitiligo which is a lack of pigment in her skin with white patches, so that made her even more special and unique.  My mother was a unique and creative individual and I feel that I take after her a lot.  She was also the strongest woman I’ve ever known.  She endured the cancer that she had been fighting through for twenty-one years and was fortunate enough to have had the privilege of caring for her through it and witnessed her strength and resilience. 

Teaching me strength and resilience is the best gift she could have taught me. I believe that experiencing what is like to be different and unique actually makes us both stronger and wiser, not only because we now understand how discrimination feels, but also how “otherness” can be seen from other people’s perspectives.

It’s Mother’s Day (and for me Adopted Mother’s Day)!  God knew what he was doing when he took her home. He blessed me with so many more adopted mothers from different races and cultures and I will be eternally grateful for this. Thank You:)

 Let’s celebrate by reaching out and appreciating all of our mothers for teaching us about Kindness and Acceptance.

Let’s celebrate by showing appreciation to our mothers for raising us with their Strength and Resiliency.

Let’s work on appreciating one another for our “unique otherness” and be more open to understanding whatever disability, race, religion, gender, or cultural difference that may be different than what we currently know.

This is who I have become.

Wishing you all a wonderful week!

With Love,

Joanna