{"id":1409,"date":"2007-05-13T15:10:22","date_gmt":"2007-05-13T15:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/13\/happy-mothers-day\/"},"modified":"2007-05-13T15:10:22","modified_gmt":"2007-05-13T15:10:22","slug":"happy-mothers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/13\/happy-mothers-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Mother’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Janet Stemwedel is marking everybody’s favorite Hallmark holiday by posting an interview with her mother<\/a> about going back to school to get a science degree. As Janet says, this was a major inspiration to her:<\/p>\n

\n

I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mom, Sally Stemwedel. Although I probably couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fully grasp it when I was a kid, when she went back to school in her mid-30s my mother opened up my understanding of the world of higher education and of science, and offered me a vision of a woman’s work that the society at large did not.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s a very nice tribute, and worth reading.<\/p>\n

I’d like to offer something similar, but to be honest, I can’t think of anything specific either of my parents did to inspire me to go into science. That’s mostly because I’ve been interested in science as far back as I can remember– a family anecdote has me telling my kindergarten teacher that I planned to be either a paleontologist or a marine biologist (I forget which– I was into both things at that time). Mostly, they just supported me in whatever weird enthusiasm I happened to be going with at any given time.<\/p>\n

Probably the best tribute I can offer to both of my parents is this: A few years ago, someone asked me at dinner, “You always did well in school, and never got in any trouble. Why was that?”<\/p>\n

I thought about it for a while, and answered “Honestly, it never occurred to me that there was any other option.”<\/p>\n

That’s a credit to my parents. Not the fact that I’m oblivious– that they created an atmosphere where it just didn’t occur to me to do anything other than the right thing. So, Happy Mother’s Day, Mom (and an advance Happy Father’s Day, Dad)– you guys did good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Janet Stemwedel is marking everybody’s favorite Hallmark holiday by posting an interview with her mother about going back to school to get a science degree. As Janet says, this was a major inspiration to her: I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mom, Sally Stemwedel. Although I probably… Continue reading Happy Mother’s Day<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}