by Celeste Lindell, of Average Jane

When I was growing up, I used to think my mother spent all her time deliberately trying to embarrass me. It wasn’t until I started becoming more like her that I realized she was just living life on her own terms.

From the stories I heard about my mother’s youth, she was always one to go her own way. However, she succumbed to the mid-1960s cultural expectation that every woman should get married and have children. She told me more than once, “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have had kids…but don’t take that personally.”

She worked in advertising as a copywriter and broadcast producer for many years; the work took its toll and afflicted her with frequent migraines and back pain. She seemed happier running her own business, and started a one-woman creative agency around the time I was in high school.

Right as I was starting college, she and my father divorced. Suddenly, the domestic chrysalis that had contained her for so many years split open and a vibrant new creature emerged.

After years of yelling at me to, “Turn that crap down!” when I played my rock albums (I’d never even dreamed of having band practice at my house), my mother took up bass guitar and formed a rock band of her own. She began dating a keyboard player more than 20 years her junior. I’ll do the math for you: he was two grades ahead of me in school.

She toured the Midwest with her band for a number of years, often wearing a low-cut top that she referred to as her “boob shirt.” When she was home, she handled freelance copywriting on the side and kept up the two activities until she was diagnosed with the lung cancer that would eventually kill her.

That’s only the barest outline of her life, but it gives you an idea of the influence she had on me, even though we often butted heads.

Now that I’m no longer a perpetually red-faced teen, I recognize the value of doing what you want to do and not caring what anyone else has to say about it. Even if my mother had taught me nothing else, it would still have been a valuable legacy.