Earlier this month, I was speaking to a local sorority about smoothing the transition between college and “the real world.”  During the Q&A session, one of the young women asked me a question: What is the one piece of advice that you would give your 21-year-old self?

The answer: Don’t quit.

Like many women, the first two/three years of my post-graduation experience were rocky.  Managing finances, learning how to be a good employee, carving out a path for my career–it was all a bit more difficult than I imagined it would be.

I was almost completely alone in a city far from home, and I spent most of the first year thinking that I had made a big mistake, shaking the couch cushions for grocery money and thinking I’d never make it.  I cried.  I lost sleep.  I thought daily, maybe hourly, about packing it in.

Quitting would have been easy.  I had few connections to D.C..  I wouldn’t have been leaving good friends or a job behind.  It would have taken me half-a-day to pack my belongings, get on a plane and go back to what was familiar and easy.  But I didn’t.

I’m one of those women who doesn’t regret the mistakes she made, I regret the things that I didn’t try.

Had I left D.C. at that moment, I would have forever been a quitter.  I would have always wondered, “What if?,” and I wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of my life in regret.  If I was going to leave D.C. and give up this dream, then I was going to do it because I chose to leave, not because succeeding was too hard.

So my advice to the women graduating this weekend is that the first few years are always difficult.  Having big dreams and achieving them isn’t for the faint of heart.  There will be days when you’re sitting at the bottom of the well thinking, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”  But if you can make it past those days, there are always better ones ahead.

You are stronger than you think.  You are capable of great things if you are willing to put in the work.  And if you get to a place where your “big dream” no longer feels right for you, then leave because you choose to do something different, not because the path to achievement was too rocky.  Don’t give up on your graduation-day dream, unless you find a new one that you want more.

Recently, my Brother and I were talking on the phone when he made a smart ass remark about how I’m not a “real” Montanan anymore.  He meant it to be funny, but the questioning of my home-state roots happens to be my Achille’s Heel, so his attempt at humor came out rude.  (The snark, it’s genetic.)  While reprimanding him for piercing my soft underbelly with the business end of a rusty ice pick, I uttered the phrase, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”

This brought the conversation to a dead stop.

“Oh my God,” I said, “I’m turning into our Mother.”

“Ha! You should be so lucky!” was his reply.

And he was right.

The truth is that everyone, from our Golden Retrievers to my best friends, likes my Mother best.  And my Brother and I are completely fine with that.  We simply can’t compete with the kindest, warmest, most caring, most genuine woman living in the American West, if not the entire North American continent.

Finding the words to tell you how completely awesome my Mom, without turning this post into a catalog of Hallmark cliches, is somewhat difficult.

How do I explain how her work as a debate coach has changed the lives of hundreds of teenagers, simply because she believed in their potential and encouraged them to pursue their dreams? How do I describe the looks of glee on their faces when they run into her in the Starbucks?  Or how she beams and giggles when they pull her into these giant bear hugs and tell her how much she means to them?

She’s invited to their graduation parties, their weddings and their baby showers.  Their parents talk about her with what can only be described as reverence.  And simply because I am her daughter, these teenagers and twenty-somethings friend me on Facebook and contact me regularly to ask questions about college, resumes and politics or just to wish me a happy birthday or send me a congratulatory note.  There simply aren’t enough nice words to express how much they respect and love her, and how she loves them right back.

I may only have one biological sibling, but all across this country, there are young people who consider my Mom their second-mother.  She’s helped raise multiple doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and architects.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the astronaut.

How the hell do my Brother and I compete when one of my Mother’s surrogate children is going to be a damn astronaut?

My Mom puts my friends and my Brother’s friends on her Christmas card list under “family.”  She remembers her hairdresser’s birthday, and asks the pharmacist how his son is liking college, and whether the produce manager’s daughter made the softball team.  In fact, she could run into any one of my ex-boyfriends on the street today, and there isn’t a single one who wouldn’t be thrilled to see her.  And her kindness is not limited to just the people she knows.

My Mom is the type of lady who asks complete strangers, ”How are you?” and is genuinely interested in the answer.  This often leads to long conversations in the Wal-Mart check-out line or the airport waiting room.  None of which she minds in the slightest.

In fact, just last week, I was telling her about a bad taxi ride that I’d had that day when she reminded me about one of the cab drivers we had on her first trip to D.C..  The man’s name was Mohammed, he was originally from Egypt and he had a three-year-old grandson named Youssef who was just learning to play soccer and wanted to be a fireman when he grew up.  All of this information was gleaned on a ride from Dupont to Georgetown eight years ago, and yet, she remembers it like it was yesterday.

I sometimes wonder how I could be genetically related to a woman that good and generous and kind.  But every now and then, I catch a glimpse of her in myself, and it makes me think that there’s hope for me yet.  Most people spend their lives trying to be better parents than the ones they had, but I’ll be lucky if I’m half the mother, or half the person, that my Mom is.

My Brother and I have often discussed how jealous we are of our future children because they get to have our Mom as their grandmother.  It’ll be like hitting the lottery, and then finding out that your winnings are tax-free.  She’ll spoil them completely rotten and convince them that they can do crazy things like become an astronaut…because that’s just who she is.

So here’s to you Mom–bringer of joy, supporter of dreams, giver of hugs, cheerleader in chief, and the all-around best person that I will ever know–Happy Mother’s Day.

Over the past few weeks, reporters and commentators have tried to make sense of the nonsensical by dissecting the personal stories of the Boston Bombers.  As a result, nearly every story mentions Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s shattered dream of becoming an Olympic boxer.  Was failing to achieve this goal the catalyst for his descent?  Could all of this have been prevented if he’d succeeded?  What if?

The speculation reminds me of a video game I played in junior high called Titanic: Adventure Out of Time.  The premise was simple: You’re trying to prevent the sinking of the Titanic, because deep in the hold is a watercolor painted by Adolf Hitler, and if he becomes a famous artist, the Holocaust will be prevented.  It seems impossible to believe that the most pivotal historical events of the 20th century (WWII, the Cold War, etc.) and the murder of millions of people might have been prevented if one guy had achieved his dream, but there are people who believe it.

But the more I think about the Boston Bombings and the importance of shattered hopes, the more I realize that it’s not about whether someone becomes a boxer or an artist.

Life is full of missed opportunities and disappointments, and following these failures, people make decisions about how to carry on.  The most important decision they make is assigning blame.  Am I responsible for my failures?  Is someone else responsible for what happened?  Or is just circumstance?

Tsarnaev couldn’t take his amateur boxing career to the Olympic level because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.  He was having trouble becoming a citizen, in large part, because of a previous domestic violence arrest.  But instead of taking responsibility for his role in the event, he concocted a fairy tale in which powerful people and government agents were denying him his citizenship so that another, less-talented boxer could take his place in the ring.

Both Hitler and Tsarnaev chose to blame others for their failures and shortcomings.  They invested considerable mental energy and effort creating a narrative in which they were talented enough, strong enough and good enough, but another group had rigged the game against them and kept them down.  And once blame was outwardly assigned, revenge needed to be taken.  And frankly, I’m sick of hearing the pundits spin the tale about the many trials of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, failed boxer turned murderous bastard.

His fragile ego and complete lack of personal responsibility would not have been cured by a gold medal or a better education or a more affluent career path.  The streets of Hollywood , the professional ball fields and the skyscrapers of Wall Street are filled to the brim with people who achieved their dreams of fame, money and power only to wind up in drug treatment, bankruptcy court, jail or a coffin because of their own bad acts.  And most of those bad actors have a hard luck story to tell about their victimization and how they aren’t responsible for their actions because they were driven to their behavior by others/circumstance.

Tsarnaev isn’t a man whose shattered dreams brought him to a tipping point, he’s just a thug with a Lindsay Lohan-complex and a homemade bomb hell bent on murderous revenge.  So let’s stop talking about his broken dreams wondering, what if?

My Brother and I are very different people.

I am Norman, leaving home to explore the wide world.  And he is Paul, unwilling to leave the fish he hasn’t caught.

This week, I read an article in The Atlantic about a similar brother and sister pair.  The brother slips the chains of his small-town upbringing to seek experiences, culture and fortune in the big city.  His sister stays behind, becomes a teacher, raises a family and never longs for anything beyond the bounds of her front door.  And he thinks she is the poorer of the two, until he returns home and realizes that some things are more important than ambition.

From the time I was in pre-school, I saw my path through life very clearly, and that path led out of the mining town where we grew up.  My Brother never seemed to feel the claustrophobic strangle-hold of small town life, and instead saw our hometown as the gateway to a wilderness that he cherished.

I saw the forest. He saw the trees. And I was desperate to get out of the sticks.

High rise apartments, Chinese food delivery, a job in politics, cocktails with the girls at a fancy bar and a closet full of gorgeous clothes is essentially what I saw in my elementary/high school/college dreams.  But you know what I do in my free time, at 1:00 AM on Saturday when the buzz from the $12 cocktails is wearing off?

I search the Montana realty listing for a small house in the mountains with lots of land.  Water-frontage preferred,but optional.

So when my Brother posts photos of his travails in the great Big Sky, I get a little jealous.  Not because I wish to be riding a snowmobile through 6′of white snowy powder in the middle of April, but because he appreciated what I failed to see:  There really is no place like home.

Over the years, I’ve heard brides express a number of theories about how to choose bridesmaids.  Some believe in keeping the bridal party small, others (like most of the ladies in my hometown) believe the more the merrier, and choose 16 of their closest friends to stand up for them.  I’ve known brides who felt that the bridal party should be kept to family only.  And I’ve met a few women who didn’t want attendants, preferring to walk down the aisle alone.  But how does one choose who will make the cut?

Yesterday, I read a Jezebel article about a woman who found out that she was not going to be included in a friend’s wedding because she was too overweight and too pale to fit in with the bride’s beach wedding vision.  Suddenly, I came down with a case of the stabbies.

To exclude the woman and then explain that she was rejected because she exceeded the maximum weight requirement is tactless, insensitive, self-centered and a few other words that I can’t type here.  Leaving her out because of her weight makes you a bad friend and a person of questionable character, but sharing your darkest, innermost thoughts with her via e-mail just to rub salt takes it to a while ‘nother level.  Talk about vile.

Given this shocking exercise in perspective-less narcissism, I shouldn’t be surprised that the bride turned around and invited her “friend” to the wedding like it was some sort of game show consolation prize.  Because once you’ve been gravely insulted by someone you consider a loved one, you should be ecstatic to celebrate her marriage by purchasing a set of monogrammed towels from her registry and dancing The Funky Chicken at her reception.

I’m sorry, that was wrong of me, this bride is clearly too classy for The Funky Chicken.

Seriously though, bad bride behavior is something that we are far too tolerant of in this country and this example just takes the cake.  How did pledging your life to another person in front of family and friends become a license to behave like a Regina George-Kim Kardashian hybrid?

It’s no surprise that America’s divorce rate is so high when, instead of focusing on the marriage, we allow brides (and grooms) to turn the celebration of a life-long commitment into an audition for the adult-version of My Super Sweet 16.

So what do you think ladies:  Am I naive to think that you should choose your bridesmaids based on how you feel about them, not how they look?  Would you even entertain the notion of attending this woman’s wedding?  Could you still consider her a friend?