Once I told my 89 year old mother she was a badass. She said she “didn’t see it.” So I son-splained it to her:
“Mom,” I said, “you were born to a white woman and a black man in 1927, when interracial marriage was mostly illegal in America. Your younger sister–who could pass for white–called you the N word once when you were kids, and you held her face over a sink and washed her mouth out with soap. You grew up during the Great Depression, and left home at 16, right in the middle of WW2.
“Son, that’s not badass” my Mom said. “That’s just living.”
“You got a job working as a research scientist at the height of Jim Crow–a time when no one hired black people OR women. You bought a house in an all white neighborhood at a time when segregation was the law of the land, and made the down payment with the money you’d saved. You had one husband for 56 years, raised 5 kids who all finished high school, you’ve got a dozen grandkids, half a dozen great grandkidss, and since dad died, you’ve lived by yourself in the house you raised us all in.
“You’ve traveled the world, you ask no one for nothing, you pay your own bills, you live on your own terms. How is that not badass?”
“Son, that’s not badass” my Mom said. “That’s just living.”
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