Yesterday was Mother’s Day. It’s supposed to be the day we celebrate and honor
our Moms, a day where we show them our love and take care of them for a change.
However, I have a feeling that in most households Mom was still busy working
yesterday, helping with the food, making sure everyone was happy and cleaning
up afterwards. It’s not our fault that happens…Moms are just built that way.
They love to do for others, take care of others and sacrifice their own wants
and needs for others. My Mom is no exception.
When I was a little boy around 8 years old my Dad came home one
night and told our family he was going to be deployed overseas. He said his Marine Corps
Unit might be gone for as long as two years. To a little boy who can’t wait for
the 3:00pm bell to ring at school, two years seemed like an eternity. It made
me really sad but what I didn’t think about at the time was how hard it was
going to be on my Mom being away from the man she loved so much. They were very
close my Mom and Dad, inseparable and devoted to each other. Even though I was
little, I could feel their love for each other every single day. Now I could
feel the pain my Mom was going through without him. Sometimes I would wake up at
night and hear her crying in her room and it scared me and gave me nightmares.
But somehow my Mom would always put on a brave face, wrap her arms around me
and make things better by telling me…..”Everything is going to be okay”.
Since times were tough and money was scarce, my Mom took a job
working nights at a restaurant. Not only did she have to serve food to customers, she
had to work hard to put food on our table as well. She never complained about
it though and always had a positive attitude and a smile. I was too young to
fully understand how hard things were for her, but I do remember one incident
that gave me a glimpse of her love for her family and her willingness to
sacrifice for us.
For Christmas that year I received a tent and I planned to use it to
go camping with my Dad. But with my Dad 3,000 miles away there was little chance of that
happening. So I asked my Mom (I mean…begged my Mom) to help me set up the tent
in our back yard so I could have friends over that weekend to “camp out”. She knew
it was important to me and that I couldn’t do it on my own, but she had no time
to help me because she was late for work. I went to bed that night really
upset, missing my Dad more than ever, and just a little bit mad at Mom for not
helping me.
The next morning I woke up and went out into the kitchen. As I poured some milk on my
cereal I noticed through the patio window that there was a tent erected in the
back yard! I don’t know how my Mom managed to erect that huge tent all by
herself…and I don’t even know when she did it. But somehow she did it. I ran
outside and checked it out and noticed that she didn’t put it together quite
right, a few pieces were in the wrong places, and that’s when it hit me. She
didn’t have the time to be putting up a tent and she didn’t even know how to
put up a tent…but somehow she did her best in the middle of the night because
she loved me that much. I never worried about things again after that….I just
knew “everything was going to be okay”!
A
mother is a person who….seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five
people....
promptly announces she never did care for pie.
~ Tenneva Jordan
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