My First Memory...

My first memory is appropriately, of my mother. I can't remember where we lived at the time, or how old I was, but amazingly I had to have been younger than 2 years old because it was prior to our family moving to Nebraska in 1976 (I was born in 1974). Who knows how I remember this, but I do. It is a brief, but vivid memory.

I think when you are the one who has to get up early, it's easy to forget that others have done the same for generations. I remember one early morning - still pretty much dark in my memory - I was lying just inside the kitchen entrance, with my blanket and at least one small toy. I have always had this picture of a green toy tractor or something like it. I also can clearly see in my mind, my pajamas - the complete jumper that zips up from the foot to neck - the ones with the plastic/rubber on the bottom of the feet. Who knows why (or why any young child) was up so early, but there I was.

Almost immediately after my memory begins, I see my mother enter coming towards me from the other room and she crosses over me, talking to me as she does. I don't know what she was saying, but I am sure it was something like, "why are you up so early, you crazy kid?!" My mother goes straight to the stove where she begins to work - most likely making breakfast for my father before he goes to work.

Thinking back, there is a great and calming feeling from that memory, a surety that comes from the constancy and sacrifice of my mother. How many breakfasts did she make for me over the years? For others? How many does she still make? It's an amazing thing. I could always count on a breakfast being organized by my mother - most of the time it was something like pancakes, eggs, sausage, bacon, toast, and all those great things you get as a special breakfast now. I never remember going without food for breakfast.

There is something amazingly comforting and humbling about that. I guess it is fitting that my first memory is of my mother's early rising to a new day, a breakfast to begin a day, and the comfort that it brings me to remember that our days, my days, rarely started without my mother being there and helping to start it off right. Most fitting because she has always been a cornerstone for my life, being an anchor of faith and dedicated to the needs of others. Not sure I would want anything else as a first memory. Thanks to my mother for always getting up and lifting us up with her each morning.