Blue Shoebox

I’m sure at some point in grade school we all had the same assignment that instructed you to talk about your hero. I can’t recall how I answered. I may have used my father or my grandpa. Maybe it was my uncle. He was a veteran so it made sense to consider him a hero. Of course, now I realize that it’s always been my mom. I think maybe it took becoming a mom to see just how much of an impact she had on my life as well as my brother and sister. She’s not just a mom, she’s a protector, a creator, a friend, and so much more. My mother is my hero, and let me tell you why.

I was born in April of 1995 and my sister was born only 11 months later. We lived in a small 650 ft trailer that stood on a modest little yard made mostly of sand. The house had likely been a pretty blue long before we moved in. The sun had since bleached it to an uneven, dull, almost grey color with splotches of blue that had been salvaged by the shade. The aluminum siding was disheveled and weak as it was lifting away from the shoebox. That’s what we called it: the shoebox. The outside was rough, but the inside was worse. The holes in the ceiling of the kitchen had been patched with rolled up wash cloths and rags, and bathroom door could hardly be called such due to the child-sized hole in the bottom of it. My brothers room was an oversized closet and the living-room double as my parents room. The summers were harder inside the house than they were on the outside. At some point during our ten years there, my mom fell through the kitchen floor up to her hips. However, that was after the toilet fell through the bathroom floor… oops.

For the first several years, the house had no running water. No, we had a hand pump. My mother would bring a large canning pot back and forth filled with water and heat it up on a the wood stove to fill the tub so we could bathe. She would do the same so she could wash clothes, and dishes. She did this year round, through snow, rain, and through a miserably hot summer pregnancy in 1998. The place was trash. Simple as that. There’s no way I could try and defend the trailer. But it was home and even though it sucked, we didn’t know it did. We were always clean and always fed. All three of us were happy and healthy. I don’t remember the struggle partly because I was so young, but mostly because my parents never made it known. My mother made that shoebox a home despite everything making it something else.

Matter of fact, she did such a good job that I was sad when we finally moved in 2005.

I think a good word to use would be humility. A good lesson learned. Like I mentioned, I am now a mother of a 7 month old boy and I have moments where I think about how much easier my life could be if we made more money, or had a second car, or even had an air conditioner. Then I stop myself and think about how much harder it truly could be. I’ve learned to cherish the time we have instead of the things we have and I’ve learned to never take anything for granted. I have learned so much from my mother. I’ve learned how to cook, bake, can and make jam. She’s taught me how to drive, how to shop, and how to get that weird stain out of my white shirt. She’s taught me everything. I inherited her perseverance and humility and for that I am forever grateful. She is the reason I am a successful mother. She is always my hero.