Dear Reader:

Yesterday was the right time to pause and settle down…my poor stomach has been upset for a few days…thinking it was probably just all the tension around the election but I decided to pamper it and eat some soft foods and just be good to myself – to enjoy a relaxing day.

I was going to have a mini-me stay-cation day.

I fixed a soft egg for breakfast and then looked to see what my StoryWorth question was for this week. I read it aloud…“Did you have enough money growing up.”

I thought about that question for a few minutes before answering it.

Because of all the early personal tragedy that befell my family when I was so little (five) I was raised by so many wonderful extended family members those early years…aunts and uncles, close friends of my parents, and grandmother Wilson. (mother’s mother)

Like most small children money meant nothing to me…security meant everything. So  long as I felt loved, had food in me, and a place to sleep I felt “rich.” Then after our little family finally returned home together… soon after mother’s hand amputation…it was still security and love that meant the most to all of us.

Mother and I shared one bedroom in our duplex and the boys shared a room together. I didn’t get my first bedroom until I was thirteen after we moved to Laurens…when mother bought a three bedroom home.

In Fayetteville…we had been the “poor” relatives on that side of the family…while our cousins lived in spacious homes, their parents got new cars frequently, all of them had second vacation homes and took elaborate vacations…cruises to the Bahamas and Scottish dance camps in Nova Scotia.

The cousins were wonderful to us…always including us as family and spend the night occasions, etc. I am pretty sure my uncles paid for Ben and my camps each summer…but again it must have been hard on mother knowing that if daddy had not gotten ill and had gone in with Uncle Max as partner in the lumber company…it would have been us living a much different life…similar to my cousins.

In fact mother later told me (after she moved the family back home to Laurens) that her decision was made because the difference in the opportunity gap between my extended cousins family and us was increasingly widening with the success of the company. She didn’t want to feel like a charity case any longer.

She said she also wanted me to finally have a bedroom to myself (with the teenage years upon me) before leaving home for good. So sweet.

What I think mother overlooked was that we children saw this amazing parent, literally “single-handedly” raise us, provide us with all the essentials we needed in life- spiritual faith, work ethics, a moral compass, and some genetic grains of true “grit” to carry us through our own paths in life.

As fate would have it…it was mother’s role model that did become my blue-print for raising three children as a single parent too…and battling metastatic breast cancer. What a role model I had!

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I spent an hour or so on the deck in the sun and worked on giving the mums a much needed hair-cut – added some more plants to the deck and just took in all the beauty around me….

So until tomorrow…

” Always remember…Some people are so poor…all they have is money.”

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh