Happy Mother’s Day everyone! Today is harder than others for obvious reasons, so I’ll lighten it up Honor style with a funny story. Not too long ago my mom taught me how to make what she calls “Wednesday chicken”, a super easy lemon chicken recipe. She told me “I’m not worried about you going off to college for any reasons except in regards to two things: having to have a roommate and your cooking skills”. Frankly, I am concerned about the cooking skills too because they’re nearly non existent. Sunday night, I made this “Wednesday chicken” for my dad and Chase and I. Feeling so proud to have not burnt it and feeling like I nailed it, we cut into the chicken and were frustrated that there’s no meat on them, thinking we just bought some crappy chickens. After eating what we could, we start doing dishes and my dad, inspecting the chickens, comes to the correct conclusion that I had put the chickens in upside down with all the breast meat you eat on the bottom. So classic and so funny, she was laughing at that one.

For a lot of reasons, Chase and I are so lucky. We are lucky to have had such a great mom for as long as we did. We are lucky our mom raised us with optimism and positive outlooks. We are lucky my parents met in high school and had years of such a loving relationship to raise us. We are lucky my mom was smart and made strategic parenting decisions. We are lucky our Dad is an amazing man whose strength, intelligence, and loving nature continues to blow me away. We are lucky to have so many fun trips and memories spent with our mom. We are lucky to have such an amazing support system of family and friends. We are lucky to have motherly role models in our lives. We are lucky to have each other. We are lucky to have been raised with our faith. We are lucky to have hundreds of videos of my mom narrating our first steps or dances recitals. We are lucky to have at least some of her outstanding strength.

I really aspire to be as great of a woman and mother as mine was. She made everything growing up a lesson, and a lot of this was the teacher in her. At her Celebration of Life, some of her previous students asked me if she ever got mad or yelled at home, because she never did at school. I laughed and assured them that yes, she did but always as a result of Chase or I’s behaviors, and we’d always get a good lesson from it. Her and I could talk for hours, and we did. It is rare for someone to be SO good at being a listener AND a talker, and she was great at both. She had so many friends because she was engaging and while talking to her she was so present and so interested. I really do feel her strength in many moments and it stems from this deep sense of peace she trained me to have in hard situations. In a letter she wrote to me during a rough time of surgeries and chemo, she said “As much as I would have preferred to protect you from all of this, I know you are a better person because of this”. These words of hers I always go back to because through the last couple of months, I have discovered a new level of strength and faith that it takes to get through something this life changing. With this being said, and how important my faith is to me and was to my mom, I sometimes think how crazy it is that she named me Faith. Little did she know of the faith we’d all have to have, but all along she knew the value of it.

Along with my mom’s faith came her deep peace with life’s uncontrollable circumstances because, as she’d say, God has a plan. What’s going to happen will happen inevitably and we just must make the best out of it. Having lost a parent at a young age, I have to say that nothing really gives me fear anymore. I now know that we are capable of getting through the worst of the worst and that life must go on…and life can go on beautifully too. Some people don’t get to ever know their moms or maybe don’t have the greatest relationship with their mom. Although the time with my mom was shorter than most, I feel so blessed to have had THE BEST mom, these 18 years with her were so valuable and something I get to cherish forever. I look forward to someday becoming a mother and striving to be even half as good as the mom she was. I am sometimes mind blown at the fact that my mom started this blog and that I have her own, written wise words to show my own children one day. Here’s to my amazing mom and all the amazing mom’s with us and no longer with us, they are among life’s biggest blessings. Honwego!