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Looking Back and Looking in the Mirror

Life lessons from my daughter

Laura DeMaisBerg
Middle-Pause
4 min readJan 7, 2025

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Photo of adult hand grasping infant’s hand, by Redd Francisco on Unsplash

I’ve always been fiercely independent. I shunned outside help from a very young age, insisting on doing everything myself.

When I was seven and my fellow latchkey neighbor friends and I wanted to make swords, I broke into the basement window of our house and took an Exacto knife. I shaved off a huge chunk on my left index finger whittling a stick and, afraid to tell my mom, decided to bandage myself up with a roll of toilet paper and duct tape. Almost fifty years later, I still have a little cluster of scars along my top two knuckles.

When I was eleven, I burned my thigh trying to iron a dress on my bed. For years, I had a tiny dark brown rectangle right above the birthmark on the top corner of my leg.

When I was seventeen, I bought five plane tickets from Chicago to Florida (via Newark) on People’s Express Airlines with a money order. My high school friends and I wanted to go on a senior trip, so I collected cash from all of them and bought the tickets through a travel agent. It didn’t even occur to me to ask my mom or dad to use their credit card.

When I graduated from college and moved 2000 miles from home, my mom tried to connect me with a friend of hers in my new city to help me make some connections for a “good” job. I…

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Laura DeMaisBerg
Laura DeMaisBerg

Written by Laura DeMaisBerg

I write about seemingly mundane experiences that are relatable because we are human. Subscribe on Substack to get my stories directly: lauramc.sub-stack.com

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