Remembering Mom

Edited/expanded from FB post:


Ten years ago, as the country was still dealing with the confusing and frightening aftermath of a tragic attack, I bid farewell to someone who made all the difference for me. She embraced every challenge of raising a son and daughter with minimal help - and often great hindrance - from the men who should have been a strengthening influence on us. She saw me through every crisis in the first four decades of my life, always offering her perspective freely when asked but, in my adulthood at least, never forcing it on me. She taught me how to face my challenges head on, how to embrace others in spite of their hurtful decisions without abandoning myself, and how commited love applied and tended in the right way can coax a breathtaking rose out what seems nothing but manure. She did all these things in the only way that really matters: by her example.

I'll never forget moving my young family from Maryland to my first duty assignment in Biloxi, MS.  I was in a six-month tech school, and the Air Force wouldn't move the family until I reached my first permanent base.  It seemed like forever to a young groom who'd only been married for a few months, and especially for a bride who was caring for two young children without really knowing how to!  I arranged to rent a truck, and a fellow new airman from Delaware was to fly home that same holiday weekend and help me drive back with our stuff.  His flight didn't work out, somehow. Mom, seeing the quandary I was in, just agreed to help me drive down, without my even asking her.  We stopped at her then-boyfriend's place in Georgia - though it's suburbia now, it was out in the sticks back then! - and, as we were stopped by the roadside looking over the map to figure out how to get there from the highway (she'd always gone from the other direction, and never at night), I remember our nervous response as we were visited by one of north Georgia's finest!  We slept for just a few hours and got back on the road to Biloxi, where my friends helped us unload the truck.  We then drove another two hours to deliver mom to the airport in New Orleans and drop off the truck.  After scoping out where the rental needed to be returned, we drove to the airport, only to discover too late that the truck couldn't make it under the clearance of the airport arrival or departure area.  So in the middle of a typical Gulf Coast afternoon squall, there was mom getting drenched in the middle of an intersection, directing traffic so I could get that truck turned around.  She had to walk into the airport and catch her flight while I returned the truck, getting drenched myself on the hitchhike/walk back to the airport, where I dried my shirt a bit using on one of the hand dryers in the restroom before catching the shuttle back to Keesler.  We laughed often and heartily over that story over the next twenty years, and I've missed being able to share it with her for the last decade.  

I love and miss you, Mom, beyond telling. Pray for us.