Moms Make the World Go Around!

We are celebrating Mother’s Day this week which will be a bright spot within the quarantine journey!  There is no doubt that moms everywhere deserve to celebrate having made it this far through the COVID19 pandemic!

When I think of a crisis I often think of my own mother. When I was five years old, my oldest brother and I went to the park to play. There was a group of boys standing by that decided to cause trouble. They picked up crab apples from the ground and started throwing them at us. I distinctly remember the back of my brother’s head directly in front of me. Suddenly he ducked and a crab apple hit my left eye with a huge thud. Everything in that eye went black.

The apple had hit so hard that it broke the blood vessel behind the iris. I quickly developed glaucoma and was hospitalized for 2 weeks lying on my back with my head immobilized. The glaucoma also began to impact my other eye and the doctors were fearful I would lose my eyesight. My mother never left my side and consistently remained optimistic.

After a few weeks, I returned home with patches on both eyes, unable to see. Instead of letting my spirits flounder, my mother found out about a little girl named Julie. Julie had also suffered a severe eye injury and lived in an Indian reservation near our home. My mother brought Julie into our home as a foster child and we became inseparable. My mother spent much of her time taxiing the two of us back and forth to the eye doctor in addition to caring for her other three children. You would have thought our crisis would have been overwhelming enough, but my mother helped somebody else in their crisis and treated Julie as if she was her own child. 

Over time, my eyes began to heal. I required surgery and glasses to remedy additional complications. My vision was not perfect, but miraculously my eyesight returned in both eyes.

The one person I can attribute my resilience to was my mother. During this crisis, she never let me fall into the sympathy trap and kept her expectations of me very high. She understood that I may never see again, but she never saw me as a person without sight. Instead, she always told me I had beautiful eyes and a great smile to go with it.

 Now that I have my own son with disabilities, I think of her often. I am sure that the impact she had on me has everything to do with how I treat my son.   Together my mother and I have been through many crises.  I think moms were made for crises and all of us will make it through the pandemic crisis even better than when we came into it!

This week, as Mother’s Day approaches, we need to realize how much moms do every day! Take time to celebrate in any way you can and enjoy the time you have with your family!

Have a wonderful Mother’s Day and never forget that the world keeps spinning because moms are always there to hold it up!