So where else to start with this 365 project than where I started - with my mom.
Whenever one of those MySpace surveys come around asking who I admire or who my hero is, I always answer "My mother." Because it's true, yo.
She did not have an easy life growing up. I mean, none of us did, and hers was nothing worse (and probably a good deal better) than what one would see in a Lifetime movie special. Abusive alcoholic father who left when she was 12. Very troubled younger brother. Poverty - to the point that they were eating out of trashcans and mom had to drop out of highschool when she was 16 so that she could go to work and help support the family.
But really, nothing all that uncommon, sadly.
And you know what else isn't uncommon? Women who come from a background like that and are unable to make something better of thier lives. They lack the education, the social skills, the finances, the internal fortitude, whatever. Not through any fault of their own but because of what life has given them.
But not my mom. She made something of herself, of her life. She's been struggling all her life with one thing or another. As she entered adulthood and met (and married) my father, she was faced with A LOT of opposition and resentment from his family. But she never let that make her bitter, she never let that affect the relationship between her inlaws and her children.
Later she had to face one health issue after another. Severe migraines which resulted in her hospitalization when I was about eight. Cancer when I was 17. And she beat it. Crippling back pain and other pains from arthritis. And now, the doctors have found a new mass. No idea yet whether it's cancerous but even if it is, she'll beat it.
Because my mom is a fighter, a survivor, a winner.
