Four days ago I jumped in my car: picked up my mom: traded cars: drove to Buffalo airport and flew from there to Chicago. The entire trip took about 7 hours and it was absolutely flawless: not one thing went wrong. I’m all about the ease in life now so that wasn’t a surprise to me.
The day after we landed my mom and I headed to the Oprah Winfrey Network studio at Harpo Studios. I had won an essay writing contest and was invited to go to preview a screening of Miss Representation on the new Rosie show. TV is all about the “hurry up and wait” and so we did just that: line ups outside then line up inside. The good news? Oprah recognizes that much of her audience is women so there were two women’s washrooms! That was awesome…
Eventually Rosie showed up and we watched the documentary in her chilly studio.(she makes no excuses: menopause is heating her up) After the preview the young women in the show came on stage with the director and the producer for a question and answser session with the audience. We had a lot of fun my mom and I.
One of the best things was getting to spend some one on one time with my mom. She’s turning 77 in a few months and she’s still really healthy. I don’t know that she and I have ever had a one on one time for so many days. We spent all of our time together sharing stories. I tried to encourage my mom to share some of her childhood stories with me: she had a rather tough childhood becoming a ward of the state at age 7. She never got to see her mom again even though her mom tried. Her mom was not a bad person she was a poor woman trying to raise two children during the depression. She had no money and had to give my mom up to ensure she was cared for. That’s a huge sacrifice and I’m not certain it was the right thing to do: I don’t think that would happen in this day and age..Mom had many challenges in her life and she was able to overcome them all. She is strong in ways I did not know until this week and I am so happy we had the chance to connect up this way.
Chicago is a beautiful city and we spent much of our time sight seeing after we were done at the studio. We walked a lot: my mom at her age was quite happy to be able to walk around the city despite the rain. We walked so much in fact that we ended up back at our hotel just around the supper hour. Our plan had been to stop somewhere for some famous Chicago deep dish pizza but we forgot all about it until we were in our cozy room snuggled on the couch with a glass of wine. No chance of heading back after that so we ordered room service instead. We did a lot of very cool things in Chicago and had a lot of fun even if we didn’t have the deep dish pizza!
If you ever get a chance to go to Chicago take it and I hope you love every minute of it.
