Need inspiring quote about a person's value not being about their achievements

[AlexaShutUp]

My mum is an intelligent, talented and generous woman who has spent her life giving to her family, to neighbours and to our wider society. Sadly, she feels that she wasted her talent and potential by giving up her career to become a SAHM. She never found the confidence to return.

She feels that she has wasted her time and done nothing with her life. No matter what anyone says to her, she cannot entertain any alternative perspectives. As she gets older, these feelings of regret seem to be consuming her.

I'm working on a gift to try and reflect the value that she has in our lives, but I really need a quote that says something along the lines of us being so much more than the sum of our achievements in life.

Can anyone suggest a lovely quote for my lovely mum, please?

I keep a list of my favourite quotations, I hope one of these will help:

If a man is to be called a street-sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michaelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say “here lived a great street-sweeper who did his job well” – Martin Luther King Jnr

The world does not need more successful people, the world desperately needs more peacemakers, storytellers and healers. – Dalai Lama

Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it's very important that you do it, because nobody else will. – Ghandi

Some wonderful words here. I read Middlemarch as an A level text and have always loved the final paragraph about Dorothea.

The alchemist by paulo coelho is a good book about being yourself.

This one is mother Teresa:
There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those.

"Not mixing mortar, but building a cathedral". Is one of my favourites.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou xx

So many lovely quotes, I want to use them all! I might have to revise my plan in order to incorporate all of them.

OK, thanks to all of you lovely people, I now have a revised plan which will enable me to use more quotes than I had originally envisaged, but in order to make it work, I need a few more quotes that can be added in. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

In her shoes, I’d probably be enormously depressed by those quotations, and view them as attempts to depict failure in a rosy way. Isn’t there a place for actually listening to what she’s saying, rather than telling her that her feelings about her own life are invalid? Especially if these are feelings she’s had for a long time?

I know you mean very well, OP, but I’m an ambitious person, and if I’d been unfortunate enough to have not been able to pursue the career that I love, someone telling me I’d been a lovely parent and done very good community work that had an impact on lots of lives wouldn’t cut it.

Can she train for the career she wanted now?

I agree with feigning but it is a bit late for a career

Maybe too late for a career but she wants a purpose.
Is there something she could do related to the career she would have wanted?

I'd be careful OP

I like the froth and bubble one but that's it.

My mother is in a similar position and tries hard not to think about it. It is very difficult to get past the fact that you could have had a great career and didn't.

mine is limited for health reasons and I still battle with the feelings every day. We talk freely about this and she says she feels her situation is worse because she actively chose not to and bitterly regrets it.

When she was around 70, she told us she wouldn't talk about it because she was upsetting herself and there was no point going back over old ground. But my father died last year - mum was 80 - and the amount of stuff we found relating to his career, that hit her quite hard too. Well it hit me hard, and in theory I've got still got time and options.

so....tread carefully. For some reason, society is very accepting when we are heartbroken over some issues, but lack of career is not one of them.

Perhaps she won’t entertain any other perspectives because no one is listening to and accepting her perspective, which is really the only one that matters.

That’s not to say that she had to be stuck with enormous regret for the rest of her life. If you want to help her - and it sounds like you do - then do it by learning to listen, properly, not by trying to jolly her along with some quotations. (Btw, most people can’t listen properly, particularly to their own family members, so this isn’t meant to be a damming criticism of you). That will also mean you accepting that the choices she made, that presumably benefited you, do mean that she lost something in the process.

It might be hard to imagine that simply listening to, understanding and accepting her point of view will help her feel better and may even start to change the way she feels, but that’s how people work!

If it is really getting in the way of her enjoyment of life then she might benefit from talking to a counsellor or therapist too.

But we don’t know how old the OP’s mother is, do we? She might only be in her 40s...?

If it helps, you could think about it like another loss. If she was really sad because someone had died, you wouldn’t, I hope, respond by giving her some inspirational quotations. Loss is loss.

It’s harder to be with someone and allow them to feel whatever they are feeling, rather than trying to get rid of the ‘bad’ feelings by trying to cheer them up. But it’s much more helpful if you can do the former. If you are on the receiving end of the latter, you can probably see the person is well meaning, but you are simply getting the message that your feelings aren’t valid, and that the other person is so uncomfortable with them that they want to make them go away.

And how many great careers start in your 40s?

Or, another way to look a it (because I don’t think it’s obvious). I expect she knows she’s done a great job as mother and community pillar and that they were important things to do. That’s why she did them. But that’s not what she’s upset about. So telling her how good she was at it and how important it was completely misses the point.

Well I’m about to start a great career in my 40s pinecone and I’ve got a lot of friends about the same age also changing direction. We’ve got another 30 years to work! I guess the OP’s mother is probably older, but the answer to your question is loads of people!

Seriously - I’d love to know what, as I have a family member in this situation.

There is a fantastic book called Never too Late to be Great by Tom Butler-Bowden which made me feel a whole lot better about myself.

www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Too-Late-Be-Great/dp/0753555301Here's?tag=mumsnetforu03-21 a link to the book.

2nd attempt!

one of my dad's friends started training to be a doctor at 40. He lived on beans for about 7 years though!!

I have to say I agree with feining and others. I have a mental health condition that limits my career, every time I try to push forward I become ill. Add to that children (one with a disability) and I feel very shit about my lack of career and success in life. I've always been ambitious and had great aspirations, which will never be fulfilled. Quotes and the like don't really help. Neither does people telling me to be grateful for what I have. I am. But I'm disappointed in myself that I won't ever have the things I think I could have.

Yes how old is she ? I have just hit 50 and feel like that and any quotes would make me feel worse to be honest. I’d rather the support to get back out there and change things next year. I’ve spent the morning scouring volunteering position wondering how I am going to do this next year.

Appreciate that is just me, your Mum be a different age and think differently to this.