While going through my mom’s book club notebook, I found a small, folded piece of paper.
It turned out to be a certificate for completing a class with a final grade of “B” – Satisfactory.
And it was issued to my mom in 1995.
That’s right, mom took and passed an “Introduction to Computers Using the Macintosh: held at the Carteret Community College.
At age 68.
As much as my brother and I rolled our eyes when Mom couldn’t figure out to reprogram the remote after a power outage, as much as we giggled when she would leave text messages that started with “Dear” and ended with “love mom”, we had no idea that she was trying.
Mom was trying to understand computers. This is the same woman who welcomed a color TV into our family for the first time when I was little. The same woman who wouldn’t let us touch dad’s enormous desk calculator with the glowing red numbers because it “cost an arm and a leg.” A woman who saw incredible and at times unbelievable technological change just in her lifetime.
Even with taking a course, she was always so frustrated with Facebook and the internet in general “what button do I press?” and “How do I share my photos?”
But, as it turned out she was also the woman, who at the age of 68(!) took her butt to a college, enrolled in, and satisfactorily passed a course on computers.
She knew that computers were here to stay and she knew they held incredible information. Mom was thirsty for knowledge on how to tame that wild beast. She wanted to know more.
While she never really mastered the internet beyond reading and sharing things on Facebook, at least she tried. At an age when many people would have given up.
Mom tried.
