It Wasn’t Until I Was Older

Paul Marcotte
MDI Contributor

As it happens with so many things in our day-to-day lives, we don’t always appreciate or understand what is happening and what we are experiencing in life until we grow older.

We take people, places, and things for granted, and later we receive a deeper appreciation and understanding of the impact that these people and events had on our lives and how these lessons impacted our development as mature masculine men. 

This was the situation for me with my mother. It wasn’t until I was much older that I fully realized what hard work, persistence, and determination can do for a person’s life and relationships. My mother had a career when my parents got married, and in the norm back in those days – when children came along, she stopped working. My mother raised five kids, kept the house together as best she could and saw to it that our basic needs were met. 

As times and the economic situations in our great country changed, my mother went back into the workforce. She worked at a factory that built, repaired, and overhauled machinery that made shoes, back when shoes were still made in America. She became a machinist and would make components to build and repair shoe machinery. When that plant closed due to shoe production being sent overseas, she held several jobs in various industries only to end up running a machine shop later in her life!

You want to talk about going full circle.

Despite raising a family and working first part-time and then later full-time, she never forgot that there were always people in need and saw to it that she did her best to support the people in our community who didn’t have their basic needs met. 

What was being modeled for me without me fully understanding it at that time was some of the tenants of the MDI Code of Honor.

Well done Mom. And thank you.