thank you mom + ditto, but make it tech
THANK YOU, MOM —
growing up means finding the good people in your life, and falling in love with them over and over again through every different twist, turn, up, and down. it’s not necessarily a conscious choice, but i think we all do it.
and for me, that dance of love and realization, and ultimately, thankfulness that someone has somehow sticked by your side through all of your different versions, is perfectly summed up by my relationship with my mom.
i am lucky to have a mom who loves with abandon, and undemanding ease. she is so many things in addition to being a mother: an amazing wife, a sister, a cancer survivor, a shoulder for all her friends, the proud holder of the best butter chicken recipe in the tri-state area, and an unbeatable friend to window shop with.
more later, including why that last descriptor means so much, but first my words + reads:
my words: i wrote about vc show-and-tell, and what it means for signaling risk.
etc: i analyzed how edtech is keeping up with unprecedented use cases as lockdowns stretch on. one excerpt took the wind out of me.
learning lesson: the world is so unprecedented that everything is news right now, and that is a hard thing to digest. i’m going to completely “disrupt” the way i work starting this week to adapt to what feels like an evergreen in importance news cycle.
unorganized tab time:
this founder was inspired by his parents to start a company to solve their exact woes as hourly workers. the startup just raised $10 million series a.
a fitness and streaming platform for new and expecting moms
our latest episode of equity, techcrunch’s vc focused podcast
anyways,
my favorite memories with my mom look a little odd. they usually include both of us driving the subaru through the backroads (because neither of us drive on highways) and going to the mall right as it opens. once we got there it wasn’t a shopping spree. in fact, often we didn’t buy anything at all. but we got ahead of the lines, and to my mom, that is the most important part of going to the mall.
it’s the place she would drop my angsty teenage self off on friday nights with charm. it’s the place she went to two hours before my 13th birthday and reserved a table at the cheesecake factory since they still don’t take damn reservations. it’s the place where we’d go whenever i cracked my screen and needed to fix it before my dad got home and found out. it’s the place that we’d go to on one of the weekends i was home for college to run through errands and get my eyebrows done.
now, on mother’s day amid a pandemic, i find myself craving a simple stroll in the mall with my mom.
you see those strolls were our quiet love language. even during the years when our relationship struggled, i should’ve known: she didn’t need a buddy to do errands, and i’d always prefer sleeping in and handling the lines. but we called a truce. sometimes it is easier to walk in silence than say i love you and i’m sorry. sometimes all you need is just to spend just an hour doing something together.
for me, growing up means realizing the love in your life and discovering new ways to appreciate it. these days, it means realizing that my mom was in the know the whole time, and was just patiently waiting for me to catch up.
happy mother’s day to all the beautiful moms, especially mine,
n
