Theme of the Week

I’m sure that a lot of people are doing the week’s “Theme of the Week” due to the fact that Mother’s Day is around the corner (two days) and it’s that time of the year to extol the virtues of one’s mother. That being said, I’ll do the same.

What is the most important contribution your mother made to your life?

Aside from the obvious thing, like birthing me, my mother was the one to raise me virtually on her own and ensure that I had some semblance of respect for the human race as a whole. Being a single mother was not easy, I’m sure, in light of the hell I gave my mother for the many years that I lived at home from my birth through my teenage years…not to mention the 18 months I lived with my parents when I was 24/25.

One particular Mother’s Day comes to mind when I was 14 or 15 and my Dad was out to sea. I’m still not sure if she got the complete story of that night and, should she not have, I’ll relay it via this medium tonight. A good friend of mine was spending the night before Mother’s Day, partially for the reason that my mother was the closest that he had for a mother and there were plans for the next day of cooking breakfast and generally giving my mother a day off.

Instead, my friend and I ended up staying up all night, as was the norm for us, and then heading out at 3:30 a.m. to go help a friend with his paper route. As it turns out, we went to the wrong location, hung out for a while and then decided to go for a bike ride at 4 a.m.

We ended up going a total of five miles that morning and, to be perfectly honest, we had a blast! There was no traffic and it was relatively quiet and we hadn’t ridden our bikes that far before.

Referring to the above map, point one is where we lived at the time. We followed the route that I laid out in Microsoft Streets & Trips and, at point six, we rode around Janaf Shopping Center for a little while before deciding to head back to see if our friend was where we thought he should be and finish out the morning helping him deliver his newspapers.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Point seven was the point when we got busted by a local security guard at the hospital there. So, my mother got a call at 5:30 in the morning asking, “It’s 5:30 a.m., do you know where your child is at?”

She was NOT happy about the fact that she had to come to get me that early in the morning and I really ruined her Mother’s Day I think. I hope she understands that we were intending to make her day a nice one but we were derailed by a nosey security guard that had no right busting us because we weren’t really busting curfew…at least we weren’t when we got busted.

Something that she really didn’t (and probably still doesn’t) take into account was that we were just joy riding and not getting into any major amounts of trouble like doing graffiti (tagging is what they call it now) on buildings or breaking into cars or even breaking into buildings. It was just a couple of kids having fun. And we got busted for it.

That’s what my mother contributed to my life: respect. Respect for myself; respect for others. Respect is what every person needs to be taught. Because, unfortunately, there’s a serious lack of it in today’s society.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom! I love you!

Till Next Time,
Blessings!