My Boss Mom's Lessons From Survivor to Thriver

From countertops to intricately sculpted vases, she polished off every spot, line, and speckle. Her eyes penetrated into the present moment of what was right in front of her nose and her body followed. She swiftly moved between each object and room, for which she made similar methodical circular and detailing motions of pure intention to cleanse and renew.

Awe-inspired, I often watched my Mom as she would clean and garden with laser focus and energy to detail and precision. Her tasks may have been simple to any casual bystander, but she still always strove for perfection, knowing that at least she would land on excellence on her journey to restore any object and room of any degree of filth to its former glory.

Having grown up during the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia without attentive parents, my mother had been forced to discipline herself through sheer determination and vision, which must have largely contributed to saving her own life during this time period of mass destruction, starvation, and genocide throughout the country. Her calm urgency to efficiently move from one task to another led her across the tedious and often dangerous bridge of incidents to seek refuge with my father in the United States of America.

From there, starting with nothing but $25 total in their pockets, my mother used the same relentless discipline to help her escape the ruthless ruling of the Khmer Rouge to tactfully build financial freedom and an affluent and peaceful retirement through housekeeping - of all occupations out there - and a lot of wise investments and thoughtful spending with such hard-earned cash from her housekeeping and my Dad’s stewarding alone.

She taught me how to stay focused and do my best to perform every worthwhile task with discipline. She showed me that extraordinary people don't necessarily do extraordinary things but do ordinary things extraordinarily well.

For as long as I can remember, my mother has known that the present moment has all the abundance one could ever need and have to perform their best, even with limited resources. Even though she had a million reasons to mull over her abysmal past in Cambodia in despair and be distracted by the uncertain future with anxiety, she constantly managed to drop down inside her body into what was here and now and what she could do to make the most of what she had at any given moment.

Although I don't have a past as woeful as hers, I gratefully benefit from her exemplary actions of taking excellent care of what she and others possess and how she fruitfully manifested her vision of giving her children, especially me, a fresh start in life many times over. We could’ve been born and raised in the aftermath of the Cambodian Genocide while grasping with every breath to eat just enough while sharing some of the same post-traumatic stress that my parents had. Instead, we were given a chance and a thousand second chances with a vastly kinder government, an intact school system, a sacred home, and friends that were fortunately oblivious to the horrors that my parents and other Cambodian children of our generation had witnessed and experienced.

To achieve my Mom’s propensity for mindfulness no matter the circumstances, I now thankfully have the habits of meditating and playing the game of taking mental notes of the objects I see around me and organizing them by color. This game takes me out of the vast pool of thoughts in my head and instead transfixes my mind to any task at hand to do as exceptionally well as I can. No multi-tasking between browser tabs to randomly check social media. No mulling over the past. No backtracking or forward tracking on what I need to do. Just flow. As a byproduct, I am also much happier and rather peaceful with a present mind.

"Keep your mind trained and strong!” My mother would tell me if I got distracted as an adolescent. “Do your best!” was another tip she told me that goes hand-in-hand with the former. More so than just telling me this, she showed me this in her day-to-day life, and her disciplined actions for otherwise such simple tasks were the highlights that taught me infinitely louder and deeper than her words of advice ever could. With a present mind, disciplined actions are boss and make a boss mom.