Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you Moms out there! I hope you have a wonderful day, surrounded by lots of love. If you have not called your Mom to tell her you love her yet today, go do it right now. She’s waiting to hear from you. Don’t worry about me and the blog, take your time and have a nice visit. We’ll be right here when you get back.

I’ve been asked a couple of times to repost this story I told a few years back about my mom, a wonderful, loving woman who left us much too soon.

My own dear mother has been gone for over 20 years now, and I sure wish she was still here for me to tell her that I love her. My Mom was a typical stay at home mother, and as the youngest of her eight children, I was always her baby, even when I became a grown man with children of my own. I know I gave her fits sometimes, and though she was a short little round woman, she could hold her own.

When I was a young soldier, I was offered an opportunity to go to jump school and fell in love with the romantic idea of jumping out of airplanes for a living and wearing the coveted silver wings of an Airborne trooper. I called my Dad to tell him that I had been accepted to jump school and his first words were “Why the hell would you want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” His next words were “DO NOT tell your mother about this until you’re done! I have to live with the woman!”

So we kept it our secret until I made it through school, and then Dad brought my Mom down to Fort Benning, Georgia for my graduation. She didn’t know what I was graduating from, just some Army training school. On graduation day, we were to jump onto a drop zone where our families were waiting to see us. So bright and early on graduation morning, my parents and a few hundred other people were brought out in buses to the drop zone and ensconced on bleachers.

One officer after another made his little speech and then it was time for our dog and pony show. Far above, we got the word and began our jump. Meanwhile, on the ground, my Mom had gotten frustrated waiting for her son to show up, so she walked up to one of the men in uniform on the ground and said “My son is supposed to be graduating today. Do you know where he is?”

“Right up there, ma’am,” he told her and pointed to the paratroopers floating to the ground. That’s when all hell broke loose.

My chubby little mother pushed past the soldiers assigned to keep civilians off the drop zone and shook off their restraining arms as she stormed out into the middle of the graduates as they hit the ground and did their landing rolls, yelling “Nick, where are you? You get your butt down here right this minute! You know better than that! I didn’t raise you to break your legs doing something this stupid!” I swear I could hear her while I was still a hundred feet in the air!

And all the while confused young paratroopers were getting to their feet and trying to collapse their chutes as she stormed up to them demanding to know where I was. Meanwhile, my Dad (and much of the audience) was rolling around on the bleachers laughing their heads off.

Needless to say, when all the confusion died down, I had a lot of explaining to do! I’m not sure which put the fear of God into me more, facing my Mom, or a hastily called meeting with our battalion commander. But she did calm down enough to pin on my wings, and I was the only graduate that day to get a standing ovation!

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you, and I miss you.

Thought For The Day – If it rains on your parade, dance in it.

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