My mother is one of the strongest people I know.
She brought me up to be self sufficient, to stand on my own and to go after what I wanted. She made me my own man.
There was a period in my childhood when she was single and supporting us both on a teacher’s salary. I never once felt like we were poor. I always had what I needed, and often enough I had the things I wanted.
The shirt above was one of them – Quicksilver and Ocean Pacific shorts were all the rage when I was in Jr. High and the first couple years of High School, and though they were outrageously expensive, she made sure I got them (even if they didn’t look the same on me as they did on the cool kids).
Mom is also the reason I came to love sci fi and fantasy. She was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club (and might still be. Mom?). There was always a huge TBR pile on her nightstand, and she had these wonderful shelves in our spare bedroom filled with other worlds – Pern, Trantor, Rama, Majipoor, Middle Earth and many more.
Thanks to her, I read The Lord of the Rings before I completed third grade, and they told me in school that I was reading at a twelfth grade level.
And I started writing. I wrote a sci fi novel – On a Shoreless Sea, and when I quit after being rejected by a bunch of publishers for my first novel, she continued to push me to try again.
I don’t know if she knows that I know this – I guess she will now. LOL!
A couple years ago, one of my publishers contacted me to let me know that she had written to them and thanked them for publishing my books. I had to smile, and then laugh – even now, she has my back.
It’s been a difficult few years for Mark and I. Our business has been undergoing a painful but hopefully ultimately successful transition to something new. And the two-years-that-felt-like-a-century in American politics has been hard to deal with, to say the least.
We have dealt with depression and loss and financial turmoil. But together Mark and I have come through it so far, and I have faith that we will get where we need to go. I am strong, and we are strong together.
This past October, my stepdad Tony passed away unexpectedly on a trip to visit his two sons in Australia. It was devastating for my mom, totally out of the blue, and it upended her entire life and future.
But she has come through it with grace and strength, just like I knew she would.
My mom is one of the strongest people I know.
And she made me strong too.