Berly

If there is one memory I am glad I don't have it's the first time my mother saw me. That was probably a really traumatic and bloody affair, but I suppose I have to be grateful for it since it brought me here. Being a male, it is hard to imagine the kind of connection a woman has with a person that has been apart of her for nine months because I have never had a strong connection with anything that has come out of me.

I'll move on from the perverse to discuss my mother. I may favor my father in most of my physical features and sense of humor, but everything else came from her. She instilled in me a love of grammar through constant correction, a passion of reading and fantasy, the ability to argue a point even when you are wrong, and the idea that I could be whatever I wanted if I worked hard enough.

She was born into small town Northwest Alabama and grew up in a town that on the map is called Twin but is known to all locals as Yampertown near the thriving metropolis of Guin. From there she went to the University of Alabama, met and married my father, graduated a semester early to have me at age 21 (I feel I should have gotten credit for her fall coursework), and went to UA's Law School the following fall. She named me after the building and the place where my parents met and spent most of their college years, the Wesley Foundation.

She has succeeded at everything she has tried to do with class, sass, and elegance that I have tried to emulate, though sometimes our tact is questionable. For example, in second grade her teacher asked her reading group to give definitions of "pinto." The teacher's daughter who was a little pudgy and for whom my mother didn't care said, "A bean." To which my mother replied, "Of course you'd think of food."

Growing up my mother quickly got a job after law school and ended up moving up to work at a firm in Birmingham. She was quite busy but always found time to read with me and tell me stories. The first book I remember reading a connecting over was Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. She read to me about this girl that in personality was so much like both of us. Anne was strong willed, a dreamer, and stuck her foot in her mouth quite often. At the end of the book the old man who adopted her dies, and I remember crying on a small bed in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with my mother over the power of literature.

In this same vein, my mother forced me to be imaginative as a child, and to my embarrassment caught me playing the most ridiculous plot lines alone the most memorable one being the history of the American Indian with clowns. I was not allowed to have any game systems as a child because my mother feared a loss of this wonderful imagination I had developed, and while at the time I was peeved I see the value in it now. I spent my summers climbing trees, going to camp, exploring the small woods in our neighborhood, and forcing everyone who would listen to me to play the game I had just invented.

We have always been close, but it took a hit while I was in college. Toward the end of my freshman year I had discovered that my mother had been diagnosed with Lupus, yet no one in our family had thought to break the news to me until she ended up in the hospital for a week that summer. I spent the six months before her time in the hospital impatiently waiting for her to tell me since the moment my hairdresser had spilled the beans, but it never happened. Once I saw how sick it made her and what she was going through, I stopped bringing up my own personal issues for a long time because I did not want to add to her own. Here was this strong powerful woman, who was one of the best bankruptcy attorneys in the state struggling to do the only thing she ever wanted because of a disease you can't control. It made my problems seem less than important.

She eventually was forced to quit her job because the stress level was too high and only worsened her condition. We had a rebonding trip when we went to Spain for a week to visit my friend Karissa, and it was amazing spending time just the two of us. We got stuck in Paris over night after the Icelandic volcanic ash blocked our direct flight to Madrid and made an impromptu jet lagged trip to see Notre Dame. Those seven days were some of the best of my life because I got to take my mother out of the country for the first time in her life and see her experience it all.

Over the years she has struggled with what her place is in life now, and I have struggled with her. What happens when you are no longer able to do the only thing you ever wanted? How do you find a new niche when your body and mind are working against you? I don't think there's a definitive answer. I am so proud of her and know that she will find her way into something spectacular. She could never earn another cent in her life because I will always love her for everything she sacrificed to give me the life I have had and showing me from an early age that just because you are in a minority does not mean you can't be successful and do what you want to do. I love you, Mother. Lupus is what you have; it's not who you are. Just like Anne with an "e" you can succeed at anything you put your mind to. You taught it to me, so now I return it to you.