I come from choice stock. Here I am, swimming through the morass of “what am I doing here?” with the rest of the world, having just taken a dive into what everyone wants to call the real world. And I’m relishing it. While I’d like to take some credit for my delectation in such a foreign frontier, I won’t.

I was made to be this way by the remarkable woman from whom I inherited my middle name.

I have a mother who understands the sum of a life simply: days to be lived and lived well. She taught me lessons as I flowered that highlighted the beauty of the means, not the ends they accomplished. I remember a childhood guarded by a mother who spent hours volunteering at my school, getting to know my friends. A mother who sometimes disappeared into that shrouded world of a parental social life, but still snuck into my room upon her return to sing the lullaby she’d once made up to quiet my colicky older sister.

She worked a job most people poked fun at, in an attempt to mask their uneasiness of it. But I never grew up understanding that an IRS agent was someone to be feared or brushed away. The stories of her work, shared over the family dinners of which I’ve still not outgrown, were not of ordinary people being deficient or grasping. Nor did she ever speak of the need of her institution to take any bumpkin or businessman for all they were worth.

Rather, we were regaled with the hopeful humor in those she audited. We learned of the successes she witnessed, her own and of her clients. There was always an animation and cheer to her face when she spoke of her work. My later, more mature conversations with her revealed that she loved not the numbers and the rules, but the human face of what so many dismiss as a boresome career.

As a child, I remember trips to her office as special moments when I was able to try on her big-girl shoes. I’d kneel on her spinning chair and waste rolls of paper as I poked away at an elaborate printing calculator.

That instinct to mimic her has not been lost through the years. It’s not that I discovered my own love of accounting. Rather, I witnessed a woman find the beauty in the banal. My mother was a person who shaped her career to her life, not the other way around. And so, my boundless crusade for gratifying employ fitted to a more gratifying life was learned from her.

I share genes with a woman who still wraps her metaphoric arms around her growing daughter every day. Who talks me from the precipice when I’m sure that I’ve messed up bigger this time than ever before. Who congratulates even the smallest accomplishment with the same pride she once turned on herself.

I can only hope to walk the same path as my mother. And if I succeed, it is for her that I’ve done it.

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