A Modern Hero

She has dark hair, hazel eyes and an always friendly and open smile. She spent most of her life in Indiana and her teenage years a studious and social cheerleader. She later went on to marry one of her best friends and have three baby girls. She sounds average, but in reality, she isn’t just so. A mother is a person to laugh with, a shoulder to cry on, a teacher, discipliner, and a hero worth recognizing.
My mother is not like Odysseus in many ways. She hasn’t gone through an extreme perilous and trialing journey throughout the countries of the world, fighting monsters and sailing the angry seas to her destination. She doesn’t have to in order to be a hero. The very definition of hero has been distorted throughout the ages, going from an epic hero fighting mythological monsters to a James Bond or Wolverine-esque type of person. One theme remains the same, though. Problems and difficult, sometimes even trials requiring the hero to have superhuman traits block the way of this person’s attempts to achieve their goals. These are figments of people’s imagination. The real heroes, the realistic and current heroes are far from what people and pop culture recognize as heroes and often overlook them. My mother, although not superhuman, underwent one of the most underrated and important trials in one’s life, something none of the said above “heroes” would be able to do—she raised and is raising three children, maintains a proper and ideal household for doing so, and teaches her children daily to become polite and proper young women.
“It’s difficult, but so worth it.” She says when asked about raising children. From the moment a woman gives birth with a child, she is obligated with a new, immense responsibility. At that very moment, she has two choices—accept the responsibility or reject it. For most new mothers, that choice is subconscious and seems as if there’s only one choice, but even so, there is always the choice to reject the responsibility, a choice some do make. That new bundle of responsibility, the infant, will be a life commitment, never to be abandoned or mistreated. My mother chose to accept all three responsibilities and to love and nurture her children until the day comes that she passes away. Maintaining a household as well proves to be trying. “The bigger the house, the more you have to clean.” She often would say as she cleaned our smaller, yet manageable house. It as well is a daily commitment, always with something needing to be done, be it laundry, vacuuming, dusting or rearranging her furniture.
Although my mother has plenty of good qualities, she also has her share of flaws, just like Odysseus. Her particular personality flaw is over-teaching. One of her children makes a mistake, and she ensures that they have realized said mistake and know fully well it was wrong, and why. This usually occurs in a process of lectures, which is a valuable teaching tool. She even jokes, “I’ll be lecturing you girls even on my deathbed.” The problem with her lecturing is that after the initial one, several others on the same subject follow from just a few hours later, and can go on and off for an entire year, depending on how bad the mistake. Her habits of almost compulsive furniture rearranging have caused a number of miner shin, foot, and knee injuries; consequently, painful looking bruises to form on the injured area.
She may not be fighting Scylla and Karibdis, but she is making a difference in each of her three children every day. Her heroism exists in suburbia, a place rarely credited for being the home of heroes. She will continue to make a massive difference in the world by making a difference in the people around her. She will show the world through her descendants, and through her descendants’ descendants that etiquette, kindness, mercy and passion can all coincide harmoniously inside one’s soul and are highly contagious. She will fight in her own peaceful way the pop culture stereotypes and show how to define yourself by your actions, not by the way you are perceived to be with others. She will continue to be an amazing role model and a phenomenal teacher, which in turn will be passed on. She may not realize it yet, but she is successful as a mother, one of the hardest tasks in a female’s life, if so chosen. My mother is a modern hero.