Let me tell you about my mommy. She’s the little woman who used to call me “sweetheart” when I was small and scared to fall asleep. She’s the one who played me to sleep each night on her little console piano. The one who taught me to love Bach, Mozart, and Handel while I slept. She’s the one who--way back in the sixties--sometimes worked two jobs to make sure we were fed, with a roof over our heads. I remember all of that.
Sure, she had help at times. Grandparents on both sides came to the rescue more than once. But when the cold curtain of night fell across the dark Carolina countryside, it was her we clung to and counted on.
She taught us to think as if there were no box. No inside or outside. No limits at all except those we set for ourselves. She is the one who gave me and all my brothers and sisters the ability to think.
She taught me to stand for what I believed, and to always question that belief, so I would know for sure just what my life stood for.
She doesn’t know how important she is to the world. She is one of the most humble people I have ever met. She is beautiful. She is a thinker and yet she has fun with life. She once told me, after taking me to a Yes concert in 1973, that I had good taste in music. She actually drove home and listened to them.
She worries that she failed us, because of things over which she had no control. She worries that somehow, on one day or another, she missed some rare opportunity to be The Greatest Mommy Of All Time. She has no reason to worry, she just does.
My mommy gave birth to seven rambunctious and sometimes frustrating children. By 1965 she was a single mom. In those days, it was a social stigma almost impossible to deal with. Nowadays, it’s just the social norm.
She is a true Superwoman, though. Statistically, we kids should have grown up with a profound social bias against us. Statistically, at least one of us should not have lived to be an adult. Statistically at least two more of us should have died by now.
But look at us instead: One of us makes his home in Indonesia, having served as Chief of Party USAID, and now works in Ghana to help preserve the fisheries there. One of us retired as Vice President of a multi-million dollar construction manufacturing firm. One of us is CFO of another multi-million dollar company. One of us is a Project Manager of multi-million dollar construction projects in the DC metro area. One of us chose to make the Air Force a career, and is on the verge of being tapped for duty at the Pentagon. One of us manages a prosperous medical office. All of us chose our own lives, each a success.
We've all come a long way from that little white house with no running water. And that dusty little dirt road that seemed to go nowhere.
She might have made mistakes. If so, I won’t tell it. I look at the results of her life and all I see is good stuff.
She’s 81 years old and still works some days each week at Baptist Hospital Cancer Center. An hour drive, each way. She’s still active in her church, and I mean with the people, not with the building or the dogma. She lives her faith.
She still bakes delectable cakes (which she has never eaten!) and sells them so cheaply you have to wonder why she does it. I guess the answer is so clear as to be nearly invisible. She still cares.
I look in the mirror and I am glad I see her eyes.
[edit: I just realized I forgot to make this a declined payout post. I don't want to be making anything off my mom so the proceeds of this will be donated to 
