90-odd years ago, a very brave, deceptively small Irishwoman gave birth a worryingly tiny baby. She was informed that his chances of survival were small and that she would do well to shield her child from every environmental danger that she could. She did no such thing. As a matter of fact, upon being released from the hospital, she promptly took her infant son to a park with a dozen other children with God knows how many diseases. I was too young to understand it, but it would be her first two lessons to me: "you can't hide from the world just because it'll hurt you," and "a life lived cautiously isn't a life worth living."
When I was five, I celebrated my first Mother's day in her lap having my lip stitched up because a bigger, older kid had tried to steal the paper flower I'd folded for her. By the time she patched me up, it was crumpled and torn and muddy, but she held it to her heart and told me that it was the most beautiful flower she'd ever seen.
After my father came back from the first World War, she was effectively forced to raise me alone -- before and after his death. She took three jobs to support me during arguably the harshest economic depression that our country has ever known. No one, least of all me, would have blamed her if she'd said that it was too much and left me to the state like many other good mothers were forced to. But against the odds, she managed to survive long enough to see me graduate high school and even put me through a year of art school when the money would have better spent on her own well-being. She passed months later to a case of pneumonia that she just couldn't shake, but the last words she said to me were "Don't give up. Don't ever let anyone tell that you can't be who you want to be." Those were the words that I held close when I tried to enlist the following year, knowing full well that I would be rejected for a dozen reasons.
It was that sense of
perseverance that she instilled in me that made me who I am today. If not for her, Colonel Phillips would have never overheard me passionately pleading my case to the recruiter, and I would have never been selected for Operation: Rebirth. Dr. Erskine may have created the Serum, but "Captain America" was born in those fights in the back alleys of Brooklyn -- and in the arms of the woman who patiently patched me up every time and always made me go to school the next day.
Thanks, mom. I don't know if you're looking down on me in this world, but I'm sure as hell looking up at you.
[Filtered to Bucky (616)]Are you tall enough to ride the ferris wheel again?
![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}