My mother... youngest (spoiledest) child's viewpoint

Not feeling too great today, so I just went to classes, put in a couple hours of work, and tried to take a nap.  Since my brain doesn't function properly, I didn't actually go to sleep, I just set my body down and thought about random things.

So I've decided that I didn't really achieve cognitive thought until I was about 15, maybe 16.  I was irritated with my mother for having the gall to make me do something useful, until the sudden realization hit me that I could actually control my mood, and the way I thought about things.  This was a major breakthrough for me, since I was a professional whiner about doing work.  That night I was actually excited about this incredible awakening I had had about life, myself, and the world.

Unfortunately, I forgot about the whole thing for about 2 years, and my mother had to bear the brunt of my whiny onslaught for the duration.  In college it came back to me, and now I enjoy thinking about thoughts, people, life, stuff like that.

My mother is an interesting woman.  I spent most of my childhood and my teenage years angry at her for some reason or another.  Usually it was because she made me work, and I saw work as the ultimate destruction of the pursuit of happiness (which was video games).  My mother always told us that she loved doing work.  She was always serving other people in some way or another.  She would come up with the most random and unique ways of serving people, especially at Christmas.  She would always have some sort of art-like project for Christmas, like making little clay angels and having them sit on jars full of candy, and giving the jars with the angels to pretty much everyone in existance.  Each year would be a different project.

I remember asking mom why she never sold any of her many random art projects to anyone.  Of course people would buy them, they were so unique and interesting, and a lot of her time went into doing things like that.  She told me something that stuck with me - "We don't need the money."

So from mom's service I learned to care about other people.  I learned to love people just because they are people.  From that saying - "We don't need the money," I learned that money is nothing more than a means to live, and to perform that service, and to enjoy life.  A means, not an end.  If it weren't for my mom, I definately wouldn't be studying to be a school psychologist. 

-Tim