In the lottery of life, I got lucky

Many years ago, when I was a college student, a philosophy professor told me that life was a great cosmic lottery. None of us chooses the parents we have. Instead, they choose to have us.

I’ve been thinking about his comment because my mother died last week, after a long and fruitful life. Of course, it’s always sad to lose a loved one. But since she passed, I’ve felt more serendipity than sorrow.

In the great cosmic lottery, I got lucky.

I got lucky because Mom taught me that men and women are — or should be — equal, in all the ways that matter. She never sat me down and said that, but she didn’t have to. It permeated everything she did.

Mom devoted her career to international family planning and maternal health. She fought for women to have access to contraceptive information and services, no matter where they lived. She thought they should be able to make their own choices about reproduction and everything else.

So “Women’s Lib” wasn’t just a saying where I grew up, in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a fundamental truth. I never questioned whether women should enjoy the same rights as men.

That’s been an enormous boon to me, as a spouse and a parent and a teacher. My wife and I have two daughters, and, because I teach about education, most of my students have been female. I would be much worse at what I do if I believed they were lesser, in any sense. And they would be worse for it, too.

I also got lucky because Mom taught me to raise my voice when I had something to say. As an educator, I am constantly trying to get students to do the same. Sadly, some of them don’t believe they have anything to say that would be worth hearing. And others are simply afraid to say what they think.

I never was. That’s because of Mom, too. If you want to write for newspapers, you need a thick skin. And she gave me one.

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The third way I got lucky was by watching Mom work. And I mean work. Hard. To succeed at anything, she taught me, you need effort. It’s not about your inherent abilities. It’s about what you do with them.

Psychologists call that a “growth mindset.” I didn’t know the term when I was younger, but again, I didn’t need to. It was drilled into me, over and over again. If you want something, work for it. And if you don’t get it right away, keep at it. Keep going.

Thanks, Mom, for the mark you left on me.

That’s been a hugely useful lesson in my life. Of course, you can take it too far. Mom insisted that you could achieve anything if you tried hard enough.

And that’s not true. We are all finite beings, in what we can imagine and create and accomplish. It’s good to keep trying, but you also have to accept your own limitations. (I keep trying to do that.)

Last, I got lucky by being exposed to the inestimable value of friendship in everything we do. My parents spent their lives traveling the world, and they collected friends at every stop. Those are the people who will nurture and replenish you until your own journey comes to an end.

When Mom died, I was overwhelmed by the expressions of love from her friends. And it came on the heels of the death of my dear friend Mark, who lived in Oregon. I went to be with Mark’s family when he died, and I was on my way home when Mom passed on.

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The novelist Wallace Stegner described friendship as something you needed to create and recreate, over and over again. It is “a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family,” Stegner wrote. “It is held together neither by law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.”

But where I grew up, it was as common as sunshine. As a kid, I don’t think I appreciated what my Mom did to sustain her friendships. Now I do. And I am lucky — again, for her example.

Mom was not perfect by any means. She could be prickly, judgmental, and blunt. She didn’t know how to read a room, and she also didn’t feel like she needed to. Whatever she thought, she said. And sometimes — actually, lots of times — you didn’t want to hear it.

But in the great cosmic lottery, I got a pretty darned good ticket. Thanks, Mom, for the mark you left on me. I was lucky to be your son.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools” (University of Chicago Press).