My Mom, Queen of Beauty Hunters

This woman is showing me how to live--full on, all in--all the way to the f*&#ing end!

Nov 15, 2024

This piece has been updated from an earlier Mother's Day story. If you tap the ❤️ icon at the top or bottom of this post, you’ll make my day and help more people find us.

Dear Beautiful Friends,

Today is my mom’s 92nd birthday. She lives a few miles from me in a retirement home with a gaggle of pals. Two years ago, following the death of my dad, she moved in to her new apartment with a pledge to be involved, and she’s nailing it! Earlier this week, my mom went downtown Seattle with friends, for a symphony recital, lunch, and a museum visit.

This woman shows us what it looks like to be ALL IN on life. Yes, she’s fortunate to be in good physical and mental health, and she’s taken care of her body in a reasonable way by staying active, eating reasonably healthy foods, keeping her mind alive, and always being awed by the beauty of the world, big and small. Her curiosity is unstoppable! She’s opinionated, we drive each other nuts, and we’re the best of mates.

So, to honor Narelle Mary Ryan Mishel, I’d like to tell you a story about an extraordinary woman I call Mom.

Narelle Mary Ryan came flaming into the world like a meteor, on November 15, 1932, at the same time that her mother died.
She grew up in Sydney, with a warm and wonderful dad who survived the battle of Gallipoli; an older brother, and a couple of step-moms and half siblings who never stayed around too long. She went to school during WWII wearing a lifesaving backpack and endured regular air raids.
My dad summed up her childhood thusly: “Your mother was a ragamuffin who grew up on the shores of Sydney.” Remove four words, and today we’d call that a million-dollar lifestyle. Hers wasn’t.
In her early 20s, she lived in London, modeling and designing hats. Years later she told me that English men always wanted to “pounce before dinner.” She did not approve, nor did she relent, and advised me to hold the same standards. “No pouncing on an empty stomach!”
She returned to Syndey and lived with friends in an apartment on Darling Point. This was when my mom met my dad — a “goddamn Yank bastard”—who Boeing very kindly sent over for some airplane business. They met at a party. He called. She ignored him for four days. He kept calling. On the fifth day she took the call, heard my dad’s bass-baritone opera singer’s voice, and she was ready in 12 minutes. They had dinner together every night for six weeks straight.

My mom’s apartment building on Darling Street was still there in 2013.

My dad flew home, my mom waved goodbye, and assumed they’d just had a fun fling.
Several long-distance phone calls and a proposal later, my mom boarded a jet plane for North America, where she married a man she’d known for three months, to live in a strange city that was wet and chilly, where women went out in public with their hair in rollers, where she lived in a tiny log cabin that was drafty, and where she knew not a single person. There was no decent beer or good bread. The water was too cold to swim in, even during the summer. Rough for an Aussie water baby.
My dad was a weight-lifting nut. He showed her how to lift barbells lying on his piano bench. She gave him what-oh-what-for, and did not lift one barbell until she was about 60, when she was good and ready. But back then, in the beginning, she must have had her fair share of What Have I Done moments.

After four years of marriage, I was born, my brother came next, and she got down to mothering—without having been mothered herself, and with a husband who traveled for six-week stints, and no family nearby.

Our matriarch with her son, daughter, and two grand kids.

Family activities included hitting a lakeside beach to watch the sunset or walking to a viewing spot to watch the moonrise. One summer we road-tripped to a bunch of national parks. We had picnics with buckets of fried chicken. I stood beside her after the sun slipped away, the horizon was stripes of gold and red, and the first star twinkled. She exclaimed over and over:

“Have you ever seen anything so bloody beautiful?!”

As a kid this made me cringe; as an adult, I wrote a poem about it, “So Bloody Beautiful,” which you can read at the end of this post.
Hiking together, 2010

My mom wasn’t concerned about “fitting in.” Consequently, I grew up doing pretty much what I wanted (lots of sports), without worrying what other people thought about that in 1974 (“Who is that girl doing all the sports??). That’s freedom.
After my mom sneezes, she’ll say out loud and in a public setting, “God bless you, you gorgeous creature.”
Energetic, curious, devouring: that’s my mom. The two of us have traveled to Greece, Rome, Northern Spain, Ireland, Austalia, and around the U.S. We’ve taken a million walks, gone for thousands of swims, and hundreds of hikes. Also: ballet, theater, opera, symphony, museums. Her appetite for life and living—even at 92 is a roaring flame.
She went in the lake five times this past summer, and she’ll let you know about it!

One Labor Day many years ago, we walked to a lakeside beach near my parents’. It was unusually warm. We were hot. The water was smooth, glittering, and Mount Rainier was right there. “I want to go in,” I said. “Me too.” she said. “I think we can do it.” We found a rocky entrance, took off our clothes, and had ourselves a skinny dip at high noon on a holiday.
My mom and I are like opposing reflections of each other: My mom never had a mom, and I never had kids. So we have:

One mother who doesn’t know what it’s like to be mothered, and one daughter who doesn’t know what it’s like to mother.

(She is also blonde with blue eyes; I am brunette with hazel eyes, and yet some people think we look strikingly alike.)
My mom has mind-bending inner strength. She might be opinionated and throw down a view on a social or political topic, but in her personal life, she is short on complaints. Get this: her eighties were a difficult decade: cancer, recovery, a husband’s progressive dementia, then blindness, then sending him to an adult family home; second-guessing herself, then covid, isolation, loneliness. All this happening in Arizona, states away from her kids, and in the midst of a political climate she didn’t align with. Almost zero complaining, but no false cheer, either.

In the mornings, my mom sat in a chair outside her front door, sipped her tea and admired the blooming cactus. This woman turns toward beauty as a way of life, good times and bad. Amazing.

She loves her new community, and her airy apartment with a view over the courtyard and its beautiful garden. She’s made friends, they laugh and get up to mischief. My mom’s an extrovert. One of my dad’s favorite things about her was how she made friends, how people loved her.
About 95 percent of the time I say, “Hey mom, do you want to ______?”, she says YES.
Recently I said to her, “You know mom, your eighties were tough. But your nineties, they’re roaring!” She laughed, and said in my dad’s way, “Oh, isn’t that something.”
You sure are, Mom.
Walking four miles across the I-520 floating bridge with her pals. I chaperoned.