Mother Knows Best
Growing up one of my family’s favorite TV sit-coms was Father Knows Best with Robert Young playing the leading role of the wise and benevolent father. But in our family, my brother and I knew it was really a mother who knew best. That’s because our father died suddenly of a massive heart attack while doing something he loved — fishing. I was seven at the time and my brother ten. Of course, no one expected my father to die at only forty-seven. For sure my mom was ill-prepared for such a tragedy. Up to that point, she had been a stay-at-home mom but suddenly, with no real savings or life insurance, she was forced to rethink her whole life which she did.
Shortly after my father’s death, mom sold our home in Massachusetts and moved to North Carolina to be close to her large family of brothers and sisters. That first year we lived with her mother in the small mill town of Louisburg to keep expenses down and so mom could start taking classes at Louisburg College, something unheard of in the fifties and sixties for a single mother in her mid-thirties to do.
At the same time she learned to be a secretary she also learned how to fill the role of father and mother and she was good at both of them. So good that each year when Father’s Day rolled around my brother and I always gave her a Father’s Day card. We didn’t make life easy for her. Our teenage years were especially challenging with only one car and three drivers but somehow we managed. Mom learned to take it all in stride even when my brother begged to take the car out for a spin shortly after receiving his driver’s license. Mom was entertaining an old friend at the time so relinquished the keys to get him to stop hounding her. Unfortunately, my brother failed to notice the friend’s car parked behind our car…until he rammed into it as he backed out of the driveway.
There’s no doubt in my mind that my deep respect for the women in my life today grew from watching my mom be the best mother and father a son could ever want.
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W. Bradford Swift has enjoyed a combo career as a writer and life coach for over thirty years and now coaches aspiring authors to write that someday, one day book TODAY. http://wbradfordswift.com/writing-coach/
