Win
I will now take the following opportunity to make my mother (Bonny) cry.
My mom is an amazing person. You should be jealous that she wasn't your mother. I am the oldest of three boys. One brother is two years younger than me, the other is 10 years younger. So my mom has been raising boys for the past 27 years.
Yep, she's insane. She caught her insanity from her job, apparently insanity is contagious. While I was growing up, my mom worked nights as a nurse at a psychiatric center. Stressful job to say the least. Even though she did that for most of the years I can remember, she always kept our house looking like "Better Homes and Gardens" magazine and cooked up a huge homemade dinner nearly every night.
You heard me, my mother is a cyborg.
Despite her superhuman qualities (or perhaps because of) she was able to maintain a healthy marriage with my father. I guess he is attracted to cyborgs. They've been married for nearly 30 years now, and I can't remember them ever having 1 fight. Now, surely they have, every marriage has arguments; but they never showed their problems in front of us. They weren't fake by any means, but they solved their disagreements in private quickly and always genuinely got along in public & at home.
My mom is currently going through some rough times.
See, my parents live over seas. My dad works for the state department. He started doing this shortly after I went to college. Every few years, they move from one country to another. So far they've been in India, Poland, Slovakia, Iraq, and starting later this year they will be going to Oman.
This makes it pretty difficult to find and maintain friendships for very long, so having an active social life is very tricky.
My two younger brothers have essentially lived with my parents the whole time they've been moving around from country to country for the past 8 years. But now, this year, both of them will move away. My youngest brother, Will, is starting college. He's going to MSU, here in Springfield where Jenny & I live. My other brother, Brian, is getting married in 3 weeks and will be starting his own family.
So my mom's house is going to empty very abruptly.
Compound one more thing into the mix, her father. Her dad has diabetes, heart problems, Alzheimer's, dementia, kidney problems, liver problems, all kinds of issues (I may be wrong about some of the specifics). Either way, there is a good chance that he is not going to be around much longer. He is currently living in Florida with one of my mom's sisters and they are working on getting him into full-time care.
My mother is the kind of person who takes hold of a situation when she realizes it needs help.
So she flew in from Poland to Florida to help with getting her dad set up.
It's been rough for her. Though she's strong, she also is a very emotional person; and obviously loves her dad a lot. It's hard for her to see him the way he is now, and hard for her to be strong in these situations. If you've had family members going through any of those medical conditions you may understand.
Today, on her birthday, she is leaving Florida and flying back to Poland. She'll be coming back with my dad & youngest brother for their scheduled fur-low in the summer. So she may get to see her dad again...but she also knows that she may have just said goodbye to him for the last time.
If you could, I'd ask for you to pray for my mom (Bonny). For her family, for all of the things she is going through, the changes, the pain she's feeling due to her dad, the new life that she'll be experiencing with all of her kids leaving. That she finds the strength, encouragement, comfort and peace that she knows God can provide her.
Thanks everyone.
