Why I’m My Mother’s Junior Associate
On the difference between doing things for the people we love and doing things with them
Tuesday before Mother’s Day. The starter at The Lakes, our local executive course, paired me with a mother and her son. She was 78, lovely, and carrying a sweet hot-pink golf bag. Her playing partner was Sean, her only child, now in his 50s.
She used a driver on every par-3. All ten of them. She struggled most of the way around. That’s okay, Sean bragged about her anyway. Not in a dutiful-son way. In a proud-son way. It was sweet.
Then, on the 9th hole, she drained a long birdie putt. Which gave her something to brag about, too. Full disclosure, hers was the only birdie that day. I think it was a Mother’s Day week thing. Yeah, definitely.
Sean knew which days she played where and with whom. They’d been playing this course or Westdrift together on Tuesdays for years.
I was happy watching them.
I was also a little jealous.
My mom is 84. She lives in Arizona.
She used to golf with her friends back when my dad golfed with his. But when his health made golf more painful than it was worth, they both stopped. Her clubs went into a closet. His were sold to a neighbor.
Even if she were still playing, having her 525 miles away for most of the year would be tough.
Golf Tuesdays weren’t in the cards for us.
The list
I enjoy visiting my folks in Arizona. I also enjoy what I do when I’m there, even though it’s mostly the stuff I detest at home. I clean the garage. I declutter my dad’s office. I rearrange the rocks in their backyard fountain until they look right. I take care of doctor stuff that’s been deferred for too long.
My love language is service. And on a Green Valley visit, I am maniacal about it. I keep a shared note while I’m there that somehow gets longer every day. I’m not happy unless I’ve crossed off at least a dozen items before my flight back.
It’s nice. But it’s not the same.
Item #7
Three months ago, I was on one of those visits. Item #7 on my list, sandwiched between “harvest lemons” and “straighten out passwords,” was “fix mission committee minutes.” I needed to know more.
My mother is the secretary of her church’s mission committee. She’s hard of hearing. For nine months, she’d been tormented by a board chair pushing ninety who insists on minutes formatted in a way nobody can follow. By that I mean basically no formatting at all. The kind of document ChatGPT can parse, but normal human eyes glaze over. She was frustrated and on the verge of quitting a role she loved.
Item #7 was supposed to be a quick fix. The kind I do well. Carefully move a couple dozen fifty-pound rocks around until the fountain looks natural again, and move on to item #8.
It didn’t go like that.
We sat down at her kitchen table, and I started to grasp what she was actually up against.
My mom isn’t adept at Word. Her email account is a wall of unread messages and overlapping threads. The mission project leads were supposed to send her monthly updates. Most sent them to the board chair instead. He didn’t forward them. The reports she did get came in every shape and size, some two sentences, some two pages, some pasted into emails, some attached as Word documents. One was well written. None of them looked like the others.
She’d been trying to assemble minutes from these scraps for nine months, often from meetings she couldn’t fully hear.
We built a system together. An AI notetaker so she wouldn’t miss anything in the meeting. ChatGPT to untangle the chair’s agenda chaos and her pile of mismatched reports. A workflow she could eventually run herself the next morning instead of depending on me.
The first month was rough.
The chair couldn’t open her cleaned-up document. Or wouldn’t. He reverted to his own version every time. So there were two sets of minutes circulating after each meeting. Hers was getting clearer and more professional. His threw away 99% of her effort and was still unreadable. But it felt like home to him.
She kept going anyway.
The second month was better. By the third meeting, she was producing minutes that the chair was actually using. Weeks later, at a social dinner, he let his guard down in a way she said she’d never seen from him. He told her he’d wanted minutes like this for years and had no idea how.
She was proud to have won him over.
I was ridiculously proud of her.
The binder
A couple of days after that round at The Lakes, my parents’ financial advisor reached out.
My folks were liquidating an annuity account they’d set up decades ago. The check came back made out to a revocable trust that had been closed for years. Most of us didn’t even know it had ever existed. The bank wouldn’t cash it.
So I called my mom.
I asked questions. She did the digging. She has the updated trust documents in a binder in the office, and she went through them with us, page by page, until she found a supporting document authorizing the revocation of the original trust. That document was the whole thing. The bank wanted proof that the old trust was actually dead, and there it was, in her binder.
She found it. The most I’d done was ask the right questions.
Twenty minutes. Done.
When we hung up, I sat at my desk for a minute. That’s when it hit me.
A partner
I’d had this wrong for three months.
Service used to mean the rocks in the fountain. It used to mean a visit list with twelve items and an efficient son with a flight to catch. It still means that, and I’ll keep doing it. But somewhere in the last three months, a different kind of help slipped in. The kind where I help her get better at what she’s already doing.
Now I fight the urge to just do it for her when she’s not looking.
When I win that battle, she gets more capable, and I end up with a partner I didn’t know I could have.
A partner is what I had on the phone about the annuity. Not someone I was helping. Someone I was working with.
Sean’s mom hits a driver on every par-3. She struggles with it. Sean shows up on Tuesdays anyway and brags about her like she’s on tour. I am 525 miles from my mother, and we will probably never play golf together. But we have something now that we didn’t have before.
I'll take this
I called her yesterday. Mother’s Day. The first call was easy. We talked through her day.
The second call was from my sister. Mom was anxious about Tuesday’s upcoming mission committee meeting. Reports were late, most in the wrong format. Some still hadn’t come.
I reminded her that I had her back. We’d sort it Monday. We got this. She settled down, and she got to have her day.
I’d rather golf with my mom. I’d take that in a heartbeat.
But we won’t have Tuesdays at The Lakes. So I’ll take this.
I’ll be her technology partner. I’ll be her muscle when the rocks need moving. And when she finds the document in the binder before I find it on Dropbox, I’ll be the proud son, bragging.