Pluses and minuses

I spent a beautiful afternoon outside of Paris today with my 'second mom'. I call her that because she was so present and influential in my life. She was our Portuguese full-time nanny and housekeeper, stayed with us from the time I was 5 to when I was 16. She's like family to us and we've stayed in touch ever since. I'll call her MT here.

Like many Portuguese people back then, MT came to France to find work. That was 36 years ago. She turns 65 in a few days and will retire at the end of the year. She is then moving back to Portugal, where she now owns her own place paid for by living frugally and saving from each paycheck.

MT is an amazing and inspiring woman. She is a secular nun who has devoted her entire life to the service of others. Everyone who's ever met her has been touched by her kindness and compassion. I've known her literally my whole life, yet today I learned things I never knew.

I knew she had never known her father, and that her mother was unable to keep her and had sent her to live with her grand-parents in the Portuguese countryside. They were extremely poor people, who could not put food on the table every day. MT grew up with her grand-father's wooden clog as her only toy. Still, she would always speak of her youth with joy and gratitude.

Today, I learned a whole new side to this story. Apparently her mother sent MT to live with her grand-parents out of fear that her dad might take her (didn't get the whole story there). MT had 2 siblings who were older and apparently not in the same danger. Apparently she did not know the whole story, and grew up thinking her dad was dead and her mom had rejected her but kept her siblings. In school, MT was registered as a 'fatherless' child, a statute not envied in a deeply religious country. She apparently deeply suffered from these things.

As she's telling us this side of the story today we've never heard, she went on to say how for every fear and feeling of inferiority and shame she had growing up, she also had amazing people who went out their way to make her feel valued and special. Her grand-mother, the local priest and others.

The way she netted out this story is that for every minus or gap thrown at her in her life, other pluses and positives came in to restore balance and carry her forward, and this is the source of inspiration for her life of service and devotion to God and humanity.

There are many things to deplore in this world, from big things like atrocities of war and social injustices and the destruction of our planet in the name of greed, to smaller things like every day inconveniences, missed opportunities, financial worries, etc... I think the lesson I learned today was that whatever situations may hit us, it is within us to look for nuggets of hope for the future in each of these.