Mommy Love
I love this image of my friend Jennifer Stahl and her daughter Catherine Raine, still fresh from Heaven. It embodies the sweet joy of new motherhood. Being a mom is my most favorite job description. As all mothers know, it can be the most difficult and most rewarding job on earth. It marked me forever, and I will never be the same because I became of mommy.
We all have favorite memories about our mothers. I have so many about my own mom. She was always so forgiving about my bringing home creatures of all kinds when I was little. She even let me have a pet snake for a bit ( what was I thinking ?) when I was in grade school.
A story that will always stand out for me though is when I was in college. I got terrible food poisoning and was away at school in Virginia, three hours from home. I went to the infirmary and they kept me because I was so sick. I don’t remember ever being that sick before. They put me in a room and called my mom. I drifted in and out of sleep, unable to sit or stand up. My room was at the end of a hallway, and I felt all alone. Then I heard it. The familiar click-click-click of my mom’s heels on the hallway floor. This was someone coming down the hall in a determined fashion. This was my mom coming to get me. She came in, took charge, and put me in the car to take me home. I knew everything was going to be okay. My mom was with me.
I have so many more I could tell, but I want to hear yours!
And to seal the deal, I am going to give away an 8×10 print from my previous rose blog. Just leave me a favorite mom story as a comment here and I will pick a winner at random by Sunday.:) I can’t wait to hear your stories!
Tickles and Kisses
10 Comments
A favortite mom moment – there are so many. My mom went to dance with Jesus this past November, so the stories flood my mind facing my first Mother’s Day without her. On one of my family’s last visits to see Mom, we arrived to find her sleeping in a chair in the family room. We all took seats and my kids sat on the hearth directly across from her. We talked quietly and just watched her sleep. In the middle of someone’s sentence Mom awakened and saw my kids across from her – the look on her face, the surprise and giddyness in hr little squeal of delight, and the smile on her face will stay in all of our minds! Missing her happiness at seeing er grandchildren was not possible! My mom loved butterflies, and God has gifted me with seeing many so far this spring; they always remind me of her!
For some reason when I was in fourth grade I really wanted my mom to substitute teach my class for me. I don’t know where the idea came from but I was serious about it. My mom was a stay at home mom and looked into what she would need to do in order to be a substitute teacher. After a short while, my teacher called in sick and in came my mom to class. She is so generous and so loving. I can’t believe she did something like that for me! I don’t know what I’d do without her.
It was when my daughter was about a year old. I was going through a tough time having stayed home a year to look after her, I wasn’t enjoy being a stay at home mom. After more than 4 months of job search and coming up with nothing, I was on my wits end and started sobbing one day in front of my husband, telling him about my insecurities about not being able to find a job and how helpless I was feeling. Amidst all that bawling, my 1 year old daughter who could barely walk crawled over and started patting me and hugging me. I was really touched and amazed by her empathy because I hadn’t expect a 1 year old baby who couldn’t even talk much yet would know how to show her love and care back in such a way.
A few days ago, my same daughter, now 11 years old mentioned one day about how she remembers that flat we used to live in. She described the set up of the house and how she remembered mommy crying one day in it.
I guess as parents, we live each day as an example for our children whether we’re conscious of it or not, and I’m thankful for my precious children who has been loving and supporting me through everything and I hope I’ll be able to live up to their expectations of being a good mom.
Simply seeing my “girl” hold my girl for the 1st time, amazing. It was like watching a horse stand and run for the first time, unsure, unclear, but knowing she was made for it: priceless. It’s been in Lauren’s nature to be priceless, feeble, and gallant in her life and her motherhood. Reminds me of someone else I know 😉
When I was on bedrest with my first pregnancy we had to move. My Mom came over and helped pack everything up and then move it to the new place. My Mom knew how much it meant to have my house in a certain order, especially the kitchen. So in order to get the kitchen just right she made a bed out of couch seat cushions on the kitchen floor. From there I directed and she put everything where it belonged. It meant so much to me. Each time I have a baby she comes over and brings prepared meals, does my laundry, cleans my house and watches my kids so I can rest up. It’s the personal details – and she never misses them.
One of my most precious memories of my mom was around my 16th birthday…. I was so excited to be Sweet 16!. As if something magical was going to happen on that day… :0) About a week prior to that day, the whole house was over taken by a smell of something awful. We couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. We all started following my father around the house like we were bloodhounds with a mystery to uncover… we never could find the origin of the powerful stench, until the day of my birthday arrived. As I got off of the bus and walked towards the house, there was a huge banner made out of brown wrapping paper, that went from one side of the garage to the other, “Happy 16th Birthday, Kelly!” It was so big every one in the neighborhood came out to see what the excitement was. My mother met me outside with a big smile and all of my friends jumped out from behind her and screamed happy birthday! I was overjoyed!! I asked my mom to take a picture with me in front of the beautiful banner that she made for me. As we got closer the smell was overwhelming!! Yes, I discovered the odor inside our home.. All along it was the banner markers she was using! She hoped for an entire week, no one would discover it was her doing! She spent every waking moment coloring that precious homemade gift… that’s my mom, she would rather make something with her heart than go and buy something. We still laugh at the fact we all probably had thousands of brain cells destroyed from the toxic chemicals in those markers she used and spent a week of our lives high as a kite… but the memory will always live in my heart that she gave a gift of her time, something she didn’t have a lot of. The older I get the more precious this memory becomes! Thanks for asking us to write about our mother’s, it was so much fun living each detail of that time of my life! Love you!
My grandparents raised me. My grandmother was 36 when I was born so she could have easily been my mother. When I was 8 years old we moved from the city to the country. I went from a very nice school with good facilities to a school that had outhouses. I was so afraid to go to that ugly, smelly,nasty toilet that I would hold everything until I got home. So — my grandmother went and cleaned the outhouse and cut down all of the weeds aound the building so that I wouldn’t be afraid of anything (like snakes) that might be lurking. I also was given my own private roll of toilet paper to take if I had to go there. That wasn’t all. Since I had to ride a school bus for the first time (in the cirty we rode a city bus) my grandmother investigated who the bus driver was. She found out that the driver was a man who was known to tip the bottle quite a bit. So- my grandmother got a petition up to have the man fired. Then she began driving the bus. She drove me all through elementary and when I went to high school, she changed also. This grandmother came to be with me when I had every one of my four children. I loved her beyond words.
My mother’s 44th birthday brought an early birthday gift….Me! As she would tell the story, it was just unheard of to be having a baby at 44 “in those days” and the doctors treated her as if she was some kind-of medical miracle! How times have changed. But she and I were both fine, and what fun it was to share a birthday. That day is bittersweet now each year, since she has been gone. The only downside to having had an “older” mom is that I’ve lost her so early. Ten years ago…and I miss her every day. But, growing up, it was awesome. She knew so much about everything and had seen and done it all before I ever came along! She’d grown up in the Great Depression and had helped to raise her siblings and put herself through college. Later, as a single gal with her own money and an adventurous spirit, she’d traveled all throughout Europe, built a subdivision in her hometown, learned to sculpt and paint, earned 2 master’s degrees and started her own company, and on a whim moved to Grand Bahama Island to teach school. She fell in love in the Bahamas, married and had me. My favorite story to hear her tell was from one of her Europe trips. On a train she became friends with a couple who were traveling with their teenage son and daughter. The teenagers were complaining about the boring things their parents had planned and my mom was doing such exciting things. She offered to take the teens along with her for a few days, and can you believe the parents agreed to it?!? That was in 1962, and would never happen now, would it? But they had a grand time and met back up with the parents to tell about all of their adventures, including accidentally wandering into an outdoor burlesque show in Paris, from which they had to make a quick escape! Oh, my!!!
My mom was an awesome mom. I was the (twin) baby of seven children. So I was about six when my mother received a phone call from France from the U.S. Airforce telling her that her son had been in a very bad automobile accident and they didn’t know if he would live. They had spent hours cutting the car away from him that had been wrapped around a pole. My mother didn’t miss a beat. She got on the phone and called our pastor and her prayer warriors and while they were coming to the house to pray; she put in a pan of raw peanuts for my twin and me and when the prayer warriors arrived; she sent us out to the back yard to eat peanuts. What I remember about that day is you could hear them praying all up and down our street. They prayed until my mother had assurance that my brother would be alright. My brother came home without a limp because of my mother’s prayers, I believe. She taught me about prayer that day and how great our God is.
I have to say that my favorite moment with my mom was only 3 months ago, when my son Sebastian was born. Out of the thirteen grandchildren my mom has, Sebastian was the only one that she was able to be there at the birth. Seeing the awe and joy in her eyes when held her youngest grandchild when he was only minutes old is something I’ll never forget.