Three Things I Learned from My Mother about Resilience - Kerry Stevens

Wishing you and your's a blessed Mother's Day. I’m honored to introduce Kerry Stevens as my featured guest blogger. Kerry and I met and worked together in high tech many years ago. We ran into each other at a Writer’s League of Texas class. We discovered we were both writing memoirs and in search of critique groups to hone our writing skills. He spearheaded a critique group that was one of the best values to my growth as an author. Kerry’s book about his mother is a tribute and filled with life’s lessons. It’s been an honor and pleasure to work with him and may this piece on resilience bless you. Thank you, Kerry!

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Three Things I Learned from My Mother about Resilience

My mother’s life could be defined by loss. As a child, she lost her father. As an adult, she lost a child of her own. When she lost the family farm, her life’s dream became a nightmare. This was just the beginning.

My late mother was a strong woman who embraced life on her own terms, bringing both blessings and tears. But even in the darkest of nights, when fear and anguish could be crushing, she found ways to survive and thrive.
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As Mother’s Day approaches, I’m reflecting on her life and three things she taught me about resilience.

First, I learned to nurture my whole self – my mind, body, and soul – because strength flows from wholeness. My mother was a voracious reader, pondering even the tiniest of life’s questions. Reading brought knowledge and confidence. She gained physical energy through self-care, enjoying foot and body massage to heal illness, and growing nutritious organic foods. To fuel her soul, she studied the Bible, engaged in music and art, and dug her hands deeply into the warm soil of her colorful flower gardens.

The second lesson she imparted was to choose resilience. My mother had no control when her father abandoned the family, and she did nothing to bring about a tumor which took her breast. Although she was often forced into life’s tragedies, she chose how to respond. When she lost her favorite job as a columnist because she spent her time helping me recover from a childhood accident, she turned her personal disappointment into an endearing fictional story about the struggles of a boy my age. While recovering from emergency open heart surgery as an aging senior, she chose not to think about her deteriorating body, but of all the new places she wished to visit when she recovered.

Lastly, my mother never forgot that spring always follows winter. She knew that life came in seasons. Though the sweetness of her marriage turned bitter in the summer of life, she didn’t spit it out. She chose to hang on, not out of desperation, but out of hope. For her, it paid off with decades of joy in her sixty-year union. She lived life to the fullest, always looking forward to the next new thing, and seldom backward to what may have bogged her down. Even in her last days, with winter quickly closing in, she lived fearlessly in faith on the cusp of a new spring.

I recognize that every mother is different. Circumstances are different. But there is wisdom to learn from a life well-lived. I’ve learned to care for my whole self, to choose to look past the warts of life, and to never forget that where’s there’s life there’s hope.

Kerry L Stevens is the lead author of “Forever Herself: A Son’s Memoir of a Remarkable Woman”. The book is about his late mother, Berthella Stevens, a Renaissance woman out of place in her Northern Indiana farming community in the 1960s. She was prolific writer who died without achieving a lifetime dream of publishing a book. Now, Kerry fulfills her dream, telling her remarkable story through the seasons of her life.

More info is available at KerryLStevens.com.

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Thank you again Kerry for your book and illumination into the resilience of mothers. Happy Mother's Day to all of you who are mothers in any form, human, fur babies, mother from another, step, or just mothering those who need a mom. You are special and loved. 

Resiliency Resources

Teresa Q. Bitner - M.Ed., PMP, ACC - Resiliency, Change and Loss Specialist
Partnering with those who've been knocked down my life and want to build resiliency and move forward and live a bold life.
 
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www.boldfulfilledlifecoach.com

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