Day 197

Day 197: Why would I challenge myself to spend a year talking about my mother? Why is she any different than every other mother on earth? I have been asked these questions, and they are certainly fair questions to ask.

I believe each one of us is both average AND extraordinary. My mother was totally average. She didn’t make a lot of money. She didn’t discover anything earth-shattering. She wasn’t famous or sought after. She was an average homemaker who was born during the depression, married during a war, worked in her parents store, worked outside the home for a time, worked side by side running a farm with her husband, served her community, raised five children, got sick, and died way before she did anything extraordinary. Her life most likely doesn’t mean a thing to people who didn’t know her.

But! As my own children have grown, married, and started having kids, they don’t talk about the expensive vacations we went on or the extraordinary things they remember about their grandparents. They talk about the average things we did. They tell stories about the seemingly mundane, definitely un-noteworthy things they remember about the visits to their grandparents’ homes. They remember the average. With fondness.

Like I said, When it comes down to it, all of us are a mix of average and extraordinary, and sometimes what we think is average, turns out to be extraordinary to someone else. Maybe writing daily about a totally average woman doesn’t seem worth the effort, but if it sparks a memory, whether average or extraordinary, or causes the reader to identify the average and extraordinary inside themselves, then it has served its purpose.

That’s right. YOU, dear reader, are both average and extraordinary, and your story deserves to be told. #MomsCompanyTowels #AverageAndExtraordinary