I always envisioned having a spiral staircase as a kid. But no matter how many times I walked into my parents “House Beautiful”  homes, the only staircases they had, they only went vertical up and down. Steps to the front and back doors, 2 steps to my parent’s beautiful new addition they’ve added to the house that included a quaint little den with a white slip covered chair, one floor lamp, a love seat. The area also had a separate den with a glass French door that provided my mother with a quiet place she would work on her “new” computer and tutored me often. One day our lesson included something she was wicked excited to share with me. I thought at the time how exciting this! I sat in the hard, wooden chair next to her in the den and pondered,  “what exactly this session was going to be about there were none of her bookshelves of old textbooks she had so often tutored me with. There was none of my 5th grade books from school on the desk. What could she possibly want to teach me today?” 

With a push of her finger to the light switch on the freshly painted white wall, there it was as I stared in amazement at an Apple IIe computer that I thought I had seen from one of her co-teachers classrooms or the principal’s office (as I was frequently called to for my mischievous behavior).

I was staring at was my first of many lessons for years to come in that quiet, peaceful den that day. 

My mother sat down and turned on the large tan box that took several minutes for anything to appear. I noticed the black screen with green words that would later be known to everyone as CODE.  She typed some words that appeared on the screen with many backslashes and periods lines (to this day I have no clue how she magically opened the floppy disk program called “Bank Street Writer” and secretly still believe maybe she didn’t want me on that without permission. However truthfully speaking, it was my own lack of concentration back then to retain even the simplest of instructions. My first lesson she taught me was how make these dashes and lines push a dot back and forth on the screen as likened to a tennis match. She typed a lot of these symbols on the keyboard and then would write them down on her notebook with her number 2 pencil (that’s all she allowed while teaching me because you could always erase what was incorrect and do it over and I was infamous for erasing my sloppy work). I loved playing this tennis game, it calmed my nervous ten or eleven year old anxieties I had at that time, and grateful that it had nothing to do with schoolwork, which never kept my attention long enough to earn ANYTHING higher than “NEEDS MORE EFFORT” grade in school. 

My mother would use this program to teach me basic math word problems and make the otherwise tedious and daunting math problems a little more fun and I actually for the first time ever in school received a “SATISFACTORY” grade instead of an “needs more effort” grade. My parents were so proud of me when I brought my card-stock report card home from school to be signed and returned. One that I did not have to forge her signature and get in trouble as I had for so many times before, and believing that “I was only caught because my mom was an Auburn school teacher” and somehow believed all of my new teachers in my new town called her to rat me out here. Obviously that wasn’t the case, my fake signature looked nothing like hers even remotely.

That same month, I would take a lot of math tests and because I remembered what she showed me about that tennis match game I’d play only for 30 minutes allotted time instead of watching TV. I gleaned a very valuable lesson that day.

My parents had always known when I tried my hardest and when I didn’t try at all. Those grades didn’t matter in the slightest to them, what mattered was if I gave what I did have to the task at hand. Failure doesn’t mean you are a failure, it just means you may require a little different approach the next time. 

From that day on, much of my reading and writing assignments (which began on that floppy disk ) which she would save for me and I could return the in next days and my work wasn’t lost and I would be able to turn them into my teacher and get “extra credit”. Eventually the next version of the floppy disk came out. And with that my mother and I were able to save more of our work and by then she had several different 3×3 hard disks that you had to carefully place in and out of their individual plastic sleeves or you’d compromise all of your work being retrieved. 

It wasn’t until nearly 40 years later when I was sitting on my own laptop writing her obituary and her longest cherished friend was on the phone with me assisting me in writing her earlier years that I was a mere baby and never knew about. She shared with me that my mother was the one who researched and implemented computers into the Auburn Maine Special Education System.  Her dear friend, who knew me as a toddler, and taught along side my mother also began to help me fix the spelling,  grammatical and punctuation errors lest not forget the proper use of adjectives and nouns (if this sentence makes any sense honestly I don’t remember the 5 parts to a proper sentence or perhaps that’s a paragraph).

Nonetheless, I could’ve never written her obituary without her and my Dad’s help. 

Who knew how such a small thing we take for granted nowadays, that there was always someone in the past had to prove that what we do in present, can always have such an impactful role in shaping generations to come. 

Be thankful of every step that you do have in life appreciate the little things others have done along the way to allow you such ease of today. It is not as easy as it may appear to you or I, “nothing is as easy as it seems.”

One may, never truly comprehend the sacrifices of past generations that were made in order for you to have that path to forge forward on today 💗

#TheHarmonyCoach