My mom dreamed of being a journalist. She skipped 4th grade, was a straight A student and a diligent worker, and undoubtedly would have excelled at college.

But she didn’t go. Her dad would pay only if she went to a teacher’s college.

In the days before student loans were readily available, and in what may have been the only act of defiance in her life, she bypassed college, left her small rural hometown after high school, and got a job working in Springfield, Illinois as a secretary in the State Department of Insurance.

By all accounts, the next several years were some of the best of her life, which is somewhat surprising since they coincided with World War II. She lived in a boarding house with a group of other young women who remained friends for life and a housemother whose barbecue rib recipe I still use. 

She dated often, spent money on well-tailored clothes, and never returned to Springfield without driving past the old boarding house and telling stories of her years there. 

She eventually married my dad, moved to Chicago, then Terre Haute, Indiana, then back to her small hometown. She had two daughters who she made sure went to college and grad school with no ultimatums, went back to work as a secretary to help with tuition, and one day told her youngest daughter, me, how she had always dreamed of being a journalist.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. She rarely wrote anything other than letters, and I was self-involved enough to be more concerned with my own dreams of going to law school.

Years later, when her health was failing, and after I had moved back to that same small town to practice law, my dad brought her to my house holding a spiral notebook in which she had written a short essay about eyebrows. She asked me to type it up for her so they could send it off to Reader’s Digest.

I don’t remember what section of Reader’s Digest they were going to send it, but I remember typing it up on our computer and showing her how we could make changes without having to start over.

Having spent years typing with messy carbon paper and a dictionary nearby, she was in awe with what I could do with a very basic computer.

As we’re prone to do with our elderly parents, I was probably patronizing, chuckling a little with my sister about the essay afterwards, and shaking my head as she and Dad sent it off to Reader’s Digest and waited for a response. 

Dad had a stroke not long after, and Mom’s macular degeneration and Parkinson’s worsened to the point that neither of them could live independently. They quit waiting for the postman and dreams died.

A sweet little essay that was about more than eyebrows was lost to time.

I find myself thinking about that essay every time I sit down to write this weekly column.

This one’s for you, Mom.

For dreams deferred.