[dropcap]M[/dropcap]y greatest achievement or accomplishment was the prompt I was going to work on next. I could not think of anything. I was talking to my son about how hard it was for me to think of anything. He looked at me and said Mom why don’t you write about when and how when dad was gone, you were the rock that kept the family together. If you hadn’t kept the family together while Dad was away, we might not have been able to move and live a better life. The time where I had to be the man and the woman of the house. I cried when he told me this when he called me the glue.
Here is the story he wants to be told.
My husband Tom came to me one evening. He needed to emotionally unload about work. Tom had hit a ceiling there, there was no room to advance, and he felt unfulfilled in his role. He said all he wanted to do was work for Cisco and own a house. That was his dream.
We started making plans to make his dream come true.
Tom got a job in North Carolina. Not Cisco, but still a better life. He had to go to New York for training and then to North Carolina to start work, find a place for us all to live and start his on the job training. This left us separated for months.
A normal day at the house.
I tried to keep things normal for Alex while Tom was away. I always made time to help him with his homework, we still had family dinners together, we would update each other on our days, do daily chores and go to Bible Study every week. Nothing was normal though. I was training my replacement at work and having to put in over sixty hours a week. Alex was in school. Together we had to purge and pack everything. I often only slept a few hours a night.
I tried to make sure Tom did not feel alone in North Carolina. Tom got daily updates on Alex and the house. I listened to his work day and shared mine, just like we would normally do in person. I tried to share and tell stories in a way that made him feel that he was there was us, that he was not missing out on anything. Alex and I just wanted to make sure he knew we were family no matter how far apart we were.
Alex said Mom it is not just the extraordinary things, it was ordinary daily things you did. Even after typing this I do not see the story he does. What I see is an amazing son.
We finally made it down to North Carolina with him. A few years after that we own a house and he works at Cisco.