Mother’s Day Tribute

Today is mother’s day. I wanted to write a little tribute to my mother and tell you about the special relationship I have with her. People debate if their is such a thing as motherly instincts. Form my experience I know without a shadow of a doubt they exist.

The moment I was born my mother’s natural instincts kicked in. As you may know I was born with a cleft lip and palate (a birth defect). At that time doctors were not able to know prior to birth that I was going to have this birth defect. So as you may imagine the shock and fear that both my parents had after I was rushed away by doctors and nurses immediately after birth. After the doctors came back in and told her about my birth defect the protective unconditional love prevailed.

I had several surgeries the first batch over the first two years to repair my lip and palate and my mother stood by me the entire time. When going through photos and home movies of me when I was a baby I get teary because I know how incredibly lucky I am to have a mother that loves me regardless of challenges.

The most valuable lesson my mother has taught me is that in every cloud there is a silver lining. After my first batch of surgeries she wrote a book to help other families that had cleft affected children. This lesson was on one of the front pages of the book. She turned what could have been a gray cloud into an opportunity to help other families see that their is hope.

She always encouraged my curiosity and uniqueness. When I was little, I liked to make up stories. I would insist that they were true. She would play along and ask questions allowing me to stretch my creative mind. However, as we all know the likelyhood of seeing an elephant in a house in Ohio is rather limited. My mother would then tell me it’s okay to tell creative stories as long as you say they that they were creative stories. As I got older I would test ideas out by framing them as news stories. “Hey Mom, did you hear about the car that can fly that is under development, what do you think?” I guess I was using Eric Ries’s Lean Startup feedback loop before it was cool.

During my entire school age years she was a stay home mother. She would be there everyday to pick me up after school. School was not easy for me, I was not the smartest and I often got picked on so having her there was the one thing that I looked forward to. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that my mother was going to be there to comfort me and to talk about any issues that I had.

I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur from an extremely young age. I loved business and selling things more than ever. Whenever my mother told me that their was a community yard sale, you would have thought that she told me Christmas was coming early. She let me organize, sell, and negotiate with all the adults that wanted to buy things. Other adults always would laugh at how I eager and fearless in selling. I did not find it as amusing then, but now I understand why they would laugh at a little seven year old trying to negotiate and upsell them on a used iron to go with the ironing board I just sold them. She never interveined or told me to go play with the other kids. She let me be me do what I loved.

She is beyond a mother she is also a friend. We share so many fun memories and I look forward to all the amazing memories to come.