My Wonderful Mother

Since it’s Mother’s Day and I’m not all that creative, I thought it would be a great time to write a post about my mom, just like everyone else. But really, it’s because I love bragging about my mother. She has accomplished some absolutely incredible things in her life and come through so much tribulation to be the wonderful person she is today.

Let me start by telling you the incredible obstacles that she has overcome:

My mother grew up as the oldest child of six. Her mother was bi-polar. Back then, they really didn’t have effective ways to treat this, so life growing up was a bit… rough at times. Needless to say, she didn’t have a whole lot of good mothering role models.

At age 18, a few months after graduating high school, she eloped to Las Vegas and married my father – a man 11 years her senior (they will not tell us any information about this wedding. I think they eloped because both of their families were opposed to them getting married). Nine and a half months later, I was born and a little over a year after they were married in Vegas they were sealed in the Los Angeles California temple.

After that, babies came quickly. My mom had three more kids by the time I was barely five, and by the time I was six (almost seven), she had also given birth to my twin sisters. So for a couple months, she had six kids under the age of six (with twin cabooses). She nursed all of us for at least a year. Including my twin sisters. Yeah, that in and of itself is incredible at a time when bottle feeding was all the rage.

Oh, did I forget to mention that my mom was also a stepmother to my dad’s children from a former marriage? Two of the boys lived with us for various amounts of time while I was growing up. And you know how stepfamily relationships are. So by the time my mother was 25 (which is how old I am now), she effectively had eight children. Also, my dad traveled for his job a lot.

Sometime before my mom gave birth to the twins, my grandmother committed suicide, leaving her with no support on that end, along with a heart-breaking tragedy to deal with.

Additionally, after the twins were born, my mother had to have a hip replacement, because when she was a baby she had an infection in a hip and it had deteriorated so much they had to replace it. At age 26. This is a lot harder on your body than you might think and is pretty crippling.

When we were a little older, my mom was also diagnosed bi-polar (luckily they had better medicines by then). 🙂

Oh yes, and one of my brothers is ADHD. Another is autistic, ADD and bipolar. I and a sister were diagnosed with depression.

So where do I start honoring someone who endured so much to raise me and my siblings? She took us to church every Sunday, taught us the gospel, got us all to school, fed us, clothed us, had family home evening, read scriptures with us. She has incredible perseverance and a determination that just boggles the mind. She would and will do anything for her children.

Despite having children with some very tough mental and behavioral issues, she didn’t kill any of us! And she somehow dealt with the sometimes very cruel judgmental/hostile attitudes that were much more prevalent then than now about kids with those sort of problems.

Her three boys got their eagles and her three girls got their young women’s medallions. Five of us graduated high school, most of us with honors. She home-schooled my autistic brother and he acheived his GED. Two of the boys have gone on missions. She completed her Associates degree this year, which is awesome after not having really attended school for 24 years. And I hear she got really good grades… at the very least straight As one semester. She has been married for 26 years, has two grandkids (mine) and became a grandmother at the young age of 37.

Her love for her children and grandchildren is second-to-none and she is always aware and worried about everyone else’s welfare. She has sacrificed so much for her children and received little thanks from us and no worldly fame. Her faith in Christ and in the gospel has never seemed to waver.

She is incredible, amazing, beautiful, wonderful. I’m so glad that she’s my mother. She often tells me how impressed she is by my determination and willingness to get things done, but you know – I learned it from her.

Thanks mom, for being there for me always and for raising me. I love you. 🙂 Happy Mother’s Day.