“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant.”
Horton the Elephant from Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches the Egg
My mother had a few Dr. Seuss books she loved reading to us. Horton Hatches the Egg was one of them after my dad had brought it back from a business trip to the U.S. Those were the days long before Amazon. As we were living in the suburbs of Munich, Germany, obtaining English books meant a trip to the specialty bookstore in the city, which didn’t have a wide selection of children’s books to begin with.
Mom loved the rhythm of “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant.” It was a fun way for her to bring her native language into our everyday lives in Germany. Mainly, Horton’s refrain was Mom’s musical way to admonish us kids when we hadn’t done what she wanted. It became a family saying, one of those fun phrases we threw around in English, and it continued swinging through my own family life when I read Horton Hatches the Egg with my kids.
“Tomorrow is another day.”
Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind
This was my mother’s antidote to the general drivenness of my father’s German family, under which my siblings and I still operate today. The unspoken but always practiced family motto was, “Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen.” (What you can do today, don’t postpone until tomorrow.)
While no slouch, my mother did take on the role of the brake in the family. She was the one who would urge the rest of us to ease off the gas pedal, first and foremost my father. He was an executive vice president at Siemens, and he had founded and chaired EuroMicro, an organization of European microchip professionals. He was also an instructor at the University of Hannover, flying there to teach every other Monday and returning home beaming. Papers and lectures were prepared late at night, after Mom had gone to bed. Overcommitment was Dad’s modus operandi, and it became that of us kids.
Not that Mom just sat home. Around age 40, she took up voice lessons and turned her love of music into a career. Ten years later, she was singing in the chorus at the Gärtnerplatz Theatre, one of Munich’s two opera houses. Nevertheless, she was the one who gave us permission to call it a day. To relax, to savor the day’s accomplishments, and trust that what you could do today, you could most often also do tomorrow. While that is still not my natural way of operating, Mom’s “tomorrow is another day” has become a good guidepost as I try to live a less hectic life.
Experience is the best teacher.
This saying annoyed my siblings and me the most because it is true. Mom would cite it when something she’d warned us about came true, when one of us, for example, wouldn’t listen and bike to school on a rainy day without the proper rain gear. She’d advise us once to take along the rain poncho. Then she’d back off, murmuring to herself and whoever was still around, “Experience is the best teacher.”
Rather than saying, “I told you so,” Mom’s “experience is the best teacher” functioned more as a reminder to herself to let go. Why expend your motherly energy when the power of the universe could do a better job of teaching your children?
As a mother, I’ve often found myself doing the same thing. Mom’s “experience is the best teacher” reminded me that my maternal powers are limited. Unless my kids are embarking on something that could be seriously unsafe, it’s often wiser to lean back and trust that they will learn a more impactful lesson from the higher powers out there.
Half of life is maintenance.
Mom’s homemaker saying started making sense once I was running my own household. I tend to find the required regularity to keep the ship afloat a nuisance, but reminding myself of Mom’s saying infuses those chores with value. Paying your taxes, taking the cars for their oil changes, pruning the trees in the spring—it all falls under maintenance. And maintenance sustains the smooth running of your life.
Mom wasn’t a regimented housekeeper. She had no “on Monday we do this, and on Tuesday we do that” approach. Her housekeeping was more organic but mindful of the many things that had to be done regularly, whether it was clipping nails or weeding flowerbeds. Sure enough, laundry didn’t pile up (Mom taught my 13-year-old brother how to launder Dad’s shirts while she was away on a longer trip, and he couldn’t wait to do it.). Bathrooms were clean (same approach here—I remember being proud of my sink-scrubbing skills); dirty dishes never piled up in the sink overnight.
Mom was an expert at assigning us kids chores and making sure we did them, not by forcing us, but rather by making us proud of our capabilities. I loved preparing my parents’ coffee on weekend mornings after she had shown me how. At age eight, I was allowed to pour the boiling water into the filter perching on top of the coffee pot. That’s probably where the pride came from: Mom trusted us kids to do dangerous things.
With me, it’s all or nothing!
From the musical Oklahoma!
When Mom started cleaning, she would scrub the entire floor, dust every surface, wash the curtains, clean all the decorative items, etc. It had to be a deep cleaning. She was not a neat freak, nor did she like to clean, but once she got going, she’d see more and more dirt, and she’d simply do a thorough job. Mom couldn’t just clean the sink and the toilet. She’d be in the bathroom, sporting her yellow rubber gloves, scrubbing the tiles and the grout in between, singing, “With me, it’s all or nothing.”
Not until I saw a live performance of the musical Oklahoma! many years later did I make the connection that this saying came from that musical. Her “all or nothing” attitude, in particular when it came to cleaning, fostered the same kind of perfectionism in me. It took me a long time to adopt the sometimes-healthier attitude of “good enough.” Run the vacuum, wipe down the toilet and the sink, and that’s good enough when guests come over.
My mom passed away last summer at the age of 86. Over the past ten years, she slowly lost her memory to dementia. When I would mention one of her signature sayings to her, hoping for a glimmer of recognition, they sadly meant nothing to her anymore. Thankfully, however, her sayings had such a lasting effect on me that they not only shaped who I became as an adult and as a mother, but they continue to reverberate in my life. Mom’s sayings are guideposts, helping me navigate through life, even though she is no longer here.
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