Obama's mama pushed him to excel
President Obama's memoir is called "Dreams from My Father." But there's an overlooked theme in the book that could merit a different title: "Hope for All Mothers."
And what better gift is there for Mother's Day than hope? I'm not talking about the politics of hope. I'm talking about hope for mothers of slackers.
Consider this passage in "Dreams from My Father" when Obama is in high school and his mother starts nagging him: "... One of your friends was just arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping. You haven't even started on your college applications."
He gets defensive in response. It's not like he's flunking out, he says, and he's got a plan: Instead of going away to college, he'll stay in Hawaii, work and take classes.
But his mom's having none of that. She tells him he can't just sit around like some "good-time Charlie. A loafer."
Let's pause here for a moment to savor the fact that the late mother of the future president of the United States once called him a loafer.
Not that young Barack really was a loafer. There "isn't much evidence he was a slacker, no matter what he says in his memoir," said Rick Shenkman, a presidential historian at George Mason University in Virginia and editor of the online History News Network.
Shenkman added that "every boy should have a mother as dedicated as Obama's. She was maniacal about education. She'd make her kid get up at 5 a.m. to study."
That was when they lived in Indonesia, when she taught him for three hours each morning from an American correspondence course before sending him off to school. Obama writes that he resisted the routine, feigning stomachaches and falling back to sleep.
It's reassuring to think that Obama's mama had the same doubts about her son that so many of us have about our own children. You can almost imagine her muttering to herself: "Will I ever get through to this kid? Why won't he listen to me?"In some ways, it's harder these days to have the kind of conversation with your child that Obama's mother had with him, the one where she called him a loafer. Kids are plugged into so many electronic devices now that it's all but impossible to get their attention. They've got an iPod bud in one ear, a cell phone bud in the other ear, and they're uploading scary party photos to Facebook while playing Halo on Xbox Live with someone whose screen name is Satan.But if you're up on the technology yourself, you could always start by texting your parental concerns. "Y R U failing math :(" might be a good opening line.It could even lead to a real conversation, with eye contact, and spoken words, in which you follow up the bit about the math grade with a more optimistic statement, something like: "Just because you got a C in bio and broke curfew Friday night doesn't mean you can't aspire to the White House!"You could say you know this for a fact, because in President Obama's memoir, he writes about drinking and using drugs — which he later characterized as "bad decisions" that "wasted a lot of time."But he managed to do OK despite those mistakes.Of course, your child's response to all of this is likely to be something like, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
But don't give up so fast. What parents say to children has a big impact, even when children pretend otherwise. Obama's not the first president to describe his mother's role in shaping him. Ronald Reagan wrote that his mother taught him "how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true." And Abe Lincoln famously said, "All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel mother."But my favorite quote when it comes to presidents and their moms is something Obama's mama said to him. In fact, I think of it as the perfect way to start a conversation with any slacker kid: "Don't you think you're being a little casual with your future?"Obama's future turned out to be his country's future. Good thing his mom was on top of it.Beth Harpaz is the author of several books including "13 Is the New 18."
