I decided to interview my mother because she is one of
the most interesting people I know. One thing about my mother is that she loves
to write. Actually she loves anything and everything that takes imagination to
enjoy. When I wake up in the morning, she is oftentimes working on some project
on her computer, and when I go to bed at about midnight, she is usually
downstairs working on some other creative hobby. She has two main creative
periods in her life: her creative hobbies as a youth and her present
imaginative projects as a stay at home mom of two children.
When she was a small child, my mother’s favorite activity
was arts and crafts. While she explained to me about what she did on
Valentine’s Day, one of her favorite days of third grade, her eyes lit up as
she told me what she did that day. She woke up to walk two blocks to the Harney
Elementary, where she made a Valentine’s box by covering a shoe box with
construction paper and making little tissue paper flowers and little pink and
red hearts to cover the box with, and when she was done with her Valentine
masterpiece, she chose her favorite
glitter glue and wrote her name in huge sprawling letters. So even as a young
kid, my mother has always had a passion for expressing herself with the things
she can make. As a freshman in high
school, my mother decided to attempt
theater as one more way to enjoy her love for being creative. She explained
that the first play she auditioned for was the musical The Wizard of Oz, and she grinned to herself as she told me that
loved dressing up in her green munchkin outfit and singing in a high pitched, squeaky
voice as the munchkins welcomed Dorothy to their world. Auditioning for Harvey in her senior year, my mother then
experienced her favorite part in a play when she received the part of Myrtle
Mae, who is the spoiled niece of Elwood P. Dowd the main character in the play.
She finally found a thing that she most passionately enjoyed doing while she
was attending Winona State University to become an English major. This thing
was poetry. From then on she was writing poetry in her free time and even began
to present it at poetry readings on and off campus, and she got some of her
poems published in a small poetry magazine. She then told me then began to tell
me about one of her most exciting nights as a student at Winona State was being
asked by the English department faculty to introduce Maya Angelou, author of the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and
future poet laureate of President Bill Clinton.
Before my mother introduced Ms. Angelou, she met her backstage and
visited with her briefly. Then when she
left Winona and became a mother, her creative hobbies became more private.
One of her new hobbies became scrapbooking. She loved and
still loves to preserve and show other people her family and their favorite
memories. When she moved to Dayton, Ohio in 1997, she was the happy wife of an
Air Force nurse and the mother of a two year old, my sister, and a one year
old, me. From then on, all of her
creative juices were put towards teaching her kids to be imaginative. Whether
it meant making Halloween costumes for her kids, building with Legos, or
decorating eggs on Easter, she loved to do fun, artistic things with her two
children, and she still does. Four years ago she also found a new
hobby—blogging. In the last few years her thoughts, her feelings, her desires,
and her experiences have made it on to her blog. Her face then lit up as she
told me she found a way to print her blog off the internet so she can have her
very own book of her very own writing. Diligently keeping a prayer journal in
the last few years, she also explained that she loves to write her thoughts to
God down on paper so that she can look back on what she has written and see how
her beliefs have changed about life. Currently, she has one big creative
project going on—the play A Christmas
Carol. She is currently is working
on making display different Christmas “eras” to set up in the theatre, which
means lots of shopping for things from lots of different eras, everything from
a Victorian era to an 1970s era. She will also be playing the part of Agnes, the
charwoman, in the production of The
Christmas Carol this winter season, which she is quite excited about.
This is my mother in a nutshell. She is a passionate
teacher, and she has a passion for learning from poetry and other arts. When
she was young she loved to make crafts and her favorite birthday present as a
child was a journal that she could write her thoughts down in. In high school
she loved theatre and in college she loved poetry and creative writing. As a
mother she has loved blogging, prayer journaling, stamping, scrapbooking, and
teaching her kids about the importance of being curious. As she sat there and
got more caught up in the story she also stated one of the most important
things to her is “not just liking a story, but discussing what makes it a good
story, and looking at a writer’s style of expressing himself.” With that, she
sat back and said, “Isaak, I really need to get back to my project!” This is my
mother who has been the most passionate, creative, brilliant teacher I have
ever had.
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