Celebration with My Mom

I finished school last night and I’m so excited! I started this post earlier this yesterday and now I know that I passed my class AND I made an A!!! I know it’s only one class but when that one class is only eight weeks, everything moves fast. Way too fast for me to consider full time at this time in my life. When I finished my final that night, I found myself wanting to call my mom. She was always my greatest cheerleader. My next thought, sorry Hubby, was Hubby and he cheers me on in his own special way and I am very grateful for that! As soon as I got my grades this morning I couldn’t wait to pass it along to our kids too, they are great cheerleaders too and they have seen what I’ve gone through! True to character, the kids were thrilled for me, thanks you guys! And Hubby, he planned an evening to take me shopping to buy me a dress and out to dinner. That will be postponed because he is under the weather tonight and business really needs to be our focus until the weekend. I am grateful for my family. Our children and Hubby gave me a reason to live in 2009 and 2012. Without their love and support in everything I do, it really might be too difficult. I understand why my mom didn’t go back to college when she might have been able to, it can be very intimidating. She would have done fantastic, there isn’t a doubt in my mind. I guess that why I miss my mom so much today, because it is a day that calls for celebration and she made every celebration special.

There isn’t really anyone else in our lives that celebrates these kinds of things with us. I think a lot of people forget to celebrate or think that it is futile, but I know that God created celebration in the form of festivals. God loves to see us celebrate, He invented it! My mom knew how to celebrate. Her kind of celebration helped me in ways she never realized, neither did I until I was much older. Hubby and I have talked about my mom lately, we have decided that she was a seven. I know that probably means nothing to most of you who read my blog, so I would encourage you (again) to read, The Road Back to You. Seven’s are fun! We love to entertain at times, we love sharing things we have learned, and we don’t sit in feelings very long. We yearn for adventure and find good in most everyone and everything. We are consistently looking to what’s next with a gleam in our eye because we kind of live life like children. I have learned a lot about them because that is what I would consider myself to be. Mom and I had a lot of those things in common so it made listening and talking with her awesome. She and I had a lot of deep conversations about a lot of topics because we both tend to go there. We know how to throw a great party and have friends from all stages of life. It’s fun to be a seven until it’s not. Things mom had struggles teaching us was routine, schedule, how to be on time, all the great things that come along with it. Mom was fun, but I’ve learned routine in marriage. LOL

I miss my mom. She understood me and she loved me with everything in her. It was so hard to parent me when I needed so much attention, and she didn’t have enough to go around. I know how tough her life was, I lived her single years with her until I left for college. I hate what she had to go through but I am grateful she got the time with her grandkids and with Buff (Bill Buffington mom’s second husband). Bill was good to my mom, I am so grateful for that. She and I spent a lot of time together her last few years. We got to travel with my job and just for fun and she would come and stay with us for a few days regularly. The last few years she took me to Mayo Hospital for a month and nursed me through multiple surgeries. I know my illness was a lot to bear when she was fighting cancer herself. Her last 11 years were priceless but so incomplete. I think, a lot, if I had known then what I know now, life with her would have been filled with so much more. But, because of the blood of Jesus Christ, we are both children of the great and mighty Creator and I know I will see her again and our incompleteness will be completed. I think the biggest part of my loneliness is that I don’t have my mom. I don’t think you ever quite get over not having your mom.

Shirlee Ann Payton Buffington was an incredible woman. I was blessed to have her as a mom, and her mother as a Nanabud (grandmother). I pray my life will be a shining example of who she helped me to become and I know, without a single doubt, that she is clapping right now for me. It takes courage to go back to school at 48, but I know that it is my calling and God will do mighty things through it. I believe she is praying for me in heaven, for me to succeed in every area of becoming who God created me to be in this world. She is so proud of me and she is definitely cheering me on!

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