I *finally* saw Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings last week. WOW. So good. I enjoyed every part of it, from soup to nuts. I’m not the best critic — I’ll see any superhero film, and I usually like to see them on the big screen (but not during a pandemic, when I live in place where vaccination rates are too low). Confession: I usually like them because they’re full of action, big music, and pretty people.

But that said, I really liked some of the choices the creators of Shang-Chi made — I liked that so much of the movie’s dialog was Chinese, that the fighting styles were varied and reflected the characters employing them, and that they had the good sense to cast Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung. Simu Liu and Awkwafina were amazing as well.

But the line in the title, “If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing,” stopped me in my tracks. One of the characters in Ta-Lo said it to Katy (Awkwafina) in the context of archery (but, you know, WAY more than archery), and I was like, “mind blown, thank you very much.”

I grew up with a mother who said that she wasn’t into goal-setting, because life is too uncertain to make definite plans. (Technically, she’s not wrong, but that’s not the whole story.)

I have tried for so long to emulate my mother, who is brave, smart, hard-working, creative, compassionate, and did I mention smart?

That said, one of the hallmarks of the dysfunction in my family is gaslighting. It’s so common that they all did it without even knowing it.

Because here’s the thing: my mom decided she wanted to be a nurse in college, AND THEN SHE DID IT. She was an RN/BSN before the BSN part was cool. And then, right after I graduated college, she got her master’s degree. She was an operating room nurse, and then moved into staff training and management. She was a nurse for 40 years. She went on medical missions to Mexico and Mali. When she retired she gave flu shots for a couple of years.

She decided she wanted to apply her musical knowledge and experience to learn to play the Celtic Harp, AND THEN SHE DID IT. Over the last 20 years, she’s played as a student, and now she and her former teacher get together to play duets every once in a while.

After she retired, she decided she wanted to work with little kids, AND THEN SHE DID IT. She tutored some children in reading, and now she assists in a couple of the classrooms in the elementary school near her house.

So, yeah, my mom may not be keen on 5-year-plans, but she knows how to set and pursue goals.

Moral of the story, kids, is that you should watch what your parents DO, not what they SAY, because if they were gaslit their whole lives by their parents (who were likely gaslit by their parents, and so on), you won’t get the whole story from their words.