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So it’s been a little more than a month since my mother’s passing. It’s been a crazy month. It’s almost a full time job managing and figuring out her estate. I’m finally meeting with a lawyer on Monday to hopefully get a grasp on what all needs to be done.

After going through a few of my Mom’s things, I’m starting to understand her a little better. She wrote a letter about her childhood that helped me understand why she was a die hard Republican. It started in college when her brother went to war in Vietnam. Her friends were all protesting the war, but she couldn’t because her brother was there. She couldn’t separate the war from the troops. She couldn’t support the troops while being against the war at the same time.

She is also against all social programs basically because her family didn’t need them. She was the youngest child, so by the time she was born, her family was pretty well off. She didn’t really know what it was like to struggle. She figured anybody that is willing to work hard, should have no problem supporting their family.

So pretty much those two issues guided her to choose her “team”, and she followed the Republican party line from then on.

Politics were one thing I never discussed with my Mom. I’m jealous of the people that can have open, honest, and smart conversations with their parents. My Mom was pretty stubborn. There was no changing her mind about anything, and I hated that. Any conversation with her was always “I’m right and you’re wrong, end of discussion”.

I shouldn’t focus on the negative though. Overall my Mother was great. She raised me and my brother by herself, and for the most part we got everything we wanted. In the last few years we were able to take quite a few vacations together as a family. I will be forever grateful of all the vacation memories. It’s really going to be hard to not talk about the fun times with my Mom anymore.

So one thing I regret is not talking to my Mom more. My Mom was hard for me to talk to. She was very opinionated, and I disagreed with her on just about everything. Almost every conversation ended up leading to politics, or some pseudoscience that she believed in. I wish I could have talked to her about my beliefs, but it would have only led to useless arguments. I still remember the last argument we had about the Washington Redskins team name. She just hated anything to do with “political correctness”. I told her that if the name was Indians, you could have an argument there, but Redskins is clearly derogatory. The team is a privately owned company and they have every right to have a derogatory name, but to deny that it’s derogatory is just ignoring reality. I’ll forever remember that argument. We didn’t argue often, but that’s mostly because I bit my tongue a lot.

My Mom was a teacher and education was important to her, but she was kind of narrow minded. She was pretty much brainwashed by Fox News. I have nothing against being conservative, but not believing in scientific facts drives me crazy. Like most conservatives, She denied global warming and evolution. To make matters worse, She was also anti-vax and anti-GMO. You know how pro-science I am. These issues drove me crazy.

One thing I am so glad I had a chance to do though was to share my telescope with her. Last summer I brought my telescope with when we rented a lake cabin. She was amazed to see Saturn. She couldn’t believe how much it looked like the pictures. It was so great to share my love of astronomy with her. She even mentioned it to her brothers and sisters because they all told me.

I always thought I was completely different from my Mom because we disagreed on so many topics, but after going through her stuff, we had much more in common than I realized.