12 things about my mom

1) She woke me up every morning until I left for college by yanking the sheets off my bed . If I wasn’t roused, she would tickle my toes. One time she even poured water on my head. I never had an alarm clock.

2) On my 18th birthday, she smashed the cake she baked for me into my face like they do in Mexican restaurants.

3) Every day she hit the reset button on our relationship, even when she had been really upset with me the night before. Even on the occasions when I got grounded for doing seriously bad things, she never stayed angry with me overnight.

4) When I used to wet my bed, she would wake up late at night and take me into the bathroom to go pee-pee.

5) Every success that I had was the best thing that had ever happened to her, and every time anyone ever did anything mean to me, there had never been a crueler injustice in all the history of the world.

6) When I was in middle school, I used to get bullied a lot so I would get on the phone in the office after lunch and call my home to tell her I was having a bad day.Whenever I had a day like that, she would always bake a chocolate cake for me that she pulled out of the oven right when I got home.

7) She was the first person who ever let me preach to her. She lets me ramble on and on about theology over the phone for half an hour when I think she doesn’t understand anything I’m talking about and then after I pause she asks a question that indicates that she was with me the whole time.

8) When I was at the lowest point in my life, she never got tired of taking the same 3 mile walk and having the same exact conversation every day for about two months.

9) She baked 1000 rice krispie treats for me when I organized an evangelism rally at the University of Virginia on Valentine’s Day, 1997.

10) When I was little, we would lie in her bed and watch “Little House on the Prairie” and “Murder She Wrote” together.

11) In every phone conversation over the last two years since I moved away from Durham where she lives, she tries to manipulate me into moving back to NC even if it means I have to turn Baptist again to get a preaching gig.

12) She has the world’s corniest looking hats that she used to wear every time we would go on family vacations anywhere it was sunny.