Thank You Momma....

It is Mother's Day. And for me, it was much like any other day. Maggie flooded the kitchen floor before we left for church. Will argued with me over the shirt I picked for him, I performed a “splinter removal operation” on Maggie’s foot, did three loads of laundry, washed the dishes, and cleaned the bathroom. In the mostly normal routine of this special Sunday, I thought continuously of my own mother. Her selflessness. Her sacrifice. The few times I actually remember her enjoying a meal while sitting down. And as those pictures of her danced in my head, I felt that overwhelming gratitude I always feel for her each and every day.

Of course, that gratitude wasn’t always as visceral as it is now. She would probably even insist that Chrissy and I love Daddy more. As girls, we have always shown him favor. Of course I love him. I even paid tribute to him on Father’s Day a few years ago (A Tribute to My Dad). And for his part, he was thrilled that he got to “read the eulogy while still alive.”  But as I’ve walked and stumbled and even crawled my way down the road of motherhood, the love, admiration, and downright awe I feel for my mother has swelled so significantly over time that I can barely put it into words.

Momma and I are different and we are the same. I am more patient. Easy-natured. Probably a little too

laid back. My emotions are often more raw. A soul with a bleeding heart. Momma is fiery, quick tempered, and does not mince words. She’s always meant business and she was never going to repeat herself. As a military brat who moved too often to forge many lasting friendships as a child, she learned to pour her loyalty into her family. She’s always willing to sacrifice her own happiness for someone else’s. Like me, she is a perfectionist. She has high standards for herself and those around her. She prays as much as anyone I know.

Smart and capable, she skipped the 11^th grade so she could graduate early. She married her high school sweetheart at 18 and has gone along with Daddy’s crazy dream and lifetime commitment to farming ever since. In the early years, and for many years throughout their life together, they didn’t have much money. Everything they had they turned back into the dirt. A mother at 21 and 23, she was no stranger to hard work. Daddy’s hours at the farm were long. In the off season, he turned his attention to hunting. She did all of the housework, all of the cooking, and most of the rearing of her children. In tough years, she did what she could to help ends meet—kept other people’s children in her home, drove the bus at our school. In the summer months, she always helped at the farm---working 20 hour days by emptying tomato buckets in the field during the day and running the packing shed well into the night. She did the payroll, paid the bills, and did all the shopping. When Chrissy and I were both in college, she went to work in retail to help pay our tuition. And at the end of each exhausting day, I am certain no one ever thanked her for her efforts.

Many nights she walked the floor with sick, screaming children. She never panicked. Not when the metal sliding board cut my ankle so deep that it exposed the bone, or when I dislocated my shoulders or tore the ligaments in my knee, or when Chrissy put the pitch fork through my foot. Even when my hand got stuck in the belt on the tomato grading machine, she acted fast to cut the power so I wouldn’t lose my hand, even though she broke her own toes in the process. She weathered the storm of having an accident-prone, clumsy child and managed to keep a smile on her face.

She has that sixth sense, like all mothers do. I was always amazed that she knew which one of us was standing in the dark at her bedside in the middle of the night without ever seeing our face. Now that I am a mother, I know that what seemed like magic was actually that she knows me so well that she can identify me by the sound of my footsteps. She also always instinctively knew when we were lying, when we were trying to play she and Dad against each other, and when we said we cleaned our rooms but really didn’t. She could be stern and strict, did not tolerate sass or disrespect, and believed wholeheartedly that a spared rod led to a spoiled child. Though Chrissy and I loathed her “unfair rules,” we managed to walk the moral high ground in our teenage years without the need for cell phones or GPS tracking because we dared not cross the door (or our mother) after curfew. 

While she never aimed to be my friend, she certainly became my most trusted ally. She taught me to stand up for myself in the “nobody likes me, everybody hates me” mean girl stages, drilling in me that self-worth found in faith would travel with me much longer than most friends. We struggled through those teen years when I was always right and demanded to have the last word. Daddy had to step in a time or two, common ground was hard to come by, and I am pretty sure she found it hard to like me at times, but she never stopped loving me--Unconditional love is always proven on the battlefield of adolescence. She consoled me over my first broken heart. And the second. And then the third. She listened through hours of me talking myself into love and then talking myself out of it. She taught me early that a boy that didn’t value my brain didn’t value the rest of me. She made sure I knew that I didn’t have to compromise myself to be loved and that if a man’s touch was ever anything but tender, it should be met with an equalizer--either a shotgun or a frying pan--whichever I could get my hand on the fastest. She was my counselor, coach & cheerleader—and later my most trusted advisor. No life decision large or small is made without her.

And though her work was always hard and thankless and no doubt exhausting, she did the one thing I sometimes find hard to believe. She kept showing up. And in a big way. She never missed anything. She went on every field trip, she planned every class party, served faithfully as the chairman of the Sally Foster Fundraiser every year without fail.  She traveled near and far to football games to watch me cheer in the rain, kept the book for at least a thousand volleyball and basketball games, hauled us and all of our friends around faithfully in her minivan for practices and tournaments. When they operated on her to remove the large (thankfully benign) lump from her left breast, still bruised from shoulder to hip two days later, she rode two very long and painful hours to watch me play a basketball game. And then rode two hours back home without complaint. When I told her before the trip that it was obvious that she needed to stay home to heal, she insisted that life must go on and there was nothing I could do to talk her out of going. She is stubborn like that.

When money was tight, she never denied us opportunities to go to camp in the summer or on trips to see the world. New York. Hawaii. South Africa. She not only paid for those trips with money she probably couldn't afford to spare, she let me go without her. She entrusted me with independence. While she was certainly giving us the best life possible, she wasn’t trying to live through us. She gave me space and time to figure it out for myself. To think on my feet. To be creative. To survive on my own. And to give me those opportunities, a 13 year private school education, a bachelor’s and master’s degree,  she sacrificed and did without. She always put our needs above her own. She ate last, ate the leftovers, wore underwear with holes in them, whatever it took to make sure we had what we needed and most of what we wanted. 

And not least of all, she taught me to rely on my faith and to follow my heart. I know at times, to her own initial disappointment. When I called home to tell her I wasn’t going to law school and after 3 years of college that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. When I told her I met a guy that was already a father and that I felt certain that he was the one. I know she questioned my judgement. She probably even questioned if she went wrong somewhere. But she just kept praying and loving me through to follow my own dreams. And then she gave me her blessing when I became a wife to Josh and a mother to Ian. She was there when Will and Maggie were born. She gave me the confidence to stay at home with my children when they were babies even though I was certain we would starve. She believes in me when I  don’t believe in myself. She encourages me to use my spiritual gifts. She makes the time to talk to me every single morning and is never too busy to be there when I need her.

Although this has been long, in short, she is everything that a mother should be. And what I know now

that I am a mother myself is that she loved me--the whole me, the future me--so much that she didn't always give in to the emotions of the 4 year old, 8 year old, 16 year old me. She molded me in that moment for a life that was coming down the road. She was always raising two Kimberlys. The one she lived with and the one that would one day live on her own. And because of her, I've had a truly incredible life. I'm a better wife, a better mother, a better person because of every sacrifice she made for me. And words can never say how truly grateful I am for her. I've never thanked her enough for all of it. No better time to do it than on Mother's Day. I love you, Momma. Thank you.