Amy Newmark - Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Amazing Mom: 101 Stories of Love and Appreciation

Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Amazing Mom

101 Stories of Love and Appreciation

Amy Newmark

Published by Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC www.chickensoup.com

Copyright 2018 by Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

CSS, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and its Logo and Marks are trademarks of Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the many publishers and individuals who granted Chicken Soup for the Soul permission to reprint the cited material.

Front cover photo courtesy of iStockphoto.com/Zerbor (Zerbor)

Back cover photo courtesy of iStockphoto.com/laflors (laflor)

Interior illustration courtesy of iStockphoto.com/Krimzoya (Krimzoya)

Photo of Amy Newmark courtesy of Susan Morrow at SwickPix

Cover and Interior by Daniel Zaccari

Distributed to the booktrade by Simon & Schuster. SAN: 200-2442

Publishers Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Names: Newmark, Amy, compiler.

Title: Chicken Soup for the Soul : my amazing mom : 101 stories of love and appreciation / [compiled by] Amy Newmark.

Other Titles: My amazing mom : 101 stories of love and appreciation

Description: [Cos Cob, Connecticut] : Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC [2018]

Identifiers: ISBN 9781611599763 (print) | ISBN 9781611592764 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mothers--Literary collections. | Mothers--Anecdotes. | Mother and child--Literary collections. | Mother and child--Anecdotes. | LCGFT: Anecdotes.

Classification: LCC HQ759 .C454 2018 (print) | LCC HQ759 (ebook) | DDC 306.874/3--dc23

Changing your life one story at a time

www.chickensoup.com

Did you ever notice that MOM spelled upside down is WOW? Thats because our moms are just AMAZING.

~Author Unknown

I worked on this collection of stories while living through the final firsts after losing my mother a year ago: the first Christmas without her, the one-year anniversary of her death a few days ago, and today, the one-year anniversary of her funeral. I worked through a lot of my grief as I edited this book, meeting all the amazing moms in these pages and feeling the same happiness, sadness, and pride as their grown childrenthe talented, selfless writers who shared these personal, moving stories with us.

It was a difficult, but enlightening experience, and when I posted about it on Twitter I got a thoughtful response from one of our long-time Chicken Soup for the Soul writersJames Warda. He shared a wonderful piece of wisdom from his sister. After their father died, she told James, I feel his absence but feel his presence more. Isnt that brilliant? And so true.

A mothers influence never stops. Whether shes in the trenches raising young children, or shes counseling her grown children, or she has passed on, the kids will always feel her support, try to make her proud, and follow her advice, even if they pretended not to be listening when they heard it. And that applies to grandmothers, and stepmothers, and mothers-in-law, and all the other mothers in our lives, all of whom are represented in these pages.

What a wide variety of tales you are about to read! In Chapter 1, Just What I Needed, youll see how Timothy Freemans mother-in-law gracefully stepped in to the role when his mother died, telling him, Youve still got a mom when you need one. He says he started crying when she told him that, and I did too!

Chapter 2 is about Lasting Lessons and its for all the moms whose sons and daughters are still rolling their eyes when their mothers try to share some wisdom and guidance with them. Laurie Carnright Edwards confesses that her mom embarrassed her terribly when they went car shopping together, insisting that there was a better deal to be had and forcing Laurie to stride out of that dealership even after two price reductions. But Mom always knows best. That car salesman called Laurie later and met her mothers terms.

Everyones mom or grandmother or mother-in-law or stepmother is a bit crazy, in a wonderful way, and we have one wacky lady after another in Chapter 3, which is called What a Character! Jill Keller tells us about the wild day she had when her mother insisted over and over again that Jill was pregnantbecause she had dreamt it. Jill knew she wasnt pregnant but her mother saw confirming signs all day long. You can guess who ended up being right!

We all have our favorite mom or grandma foods, and we have a whole chapter about that, too, but these Recipes for Life go deeper, because theres usually a backstory to these kitchen memories. Beth Krone-Downes tells us how she finally came to understand why her great-grandmothers recipes were so variable as to ingredients and so imprecise as to measurements. She had been a refugee who escaped to the United States from Germany and went through many tough times. Beth realized that her great-grandmother never knew where shed be cooking next, or what would be available to her, so her recipes were fluid and flexible, adaptive to her circumstances. Great-Grandma Johanna never told Beth how hard her life had beenit was the recipes that revealed the truth.

Talk about strugglingwe have numerous stories about mothers and grandmothers who bravely went through tough times and came out the other side, and we shared many of those stories in Chapter 5, My Role Model. Savannah D. Cassel is one grateful daughter who recounts how her single mother struggled financially to raise her. But as soon as their situation improved, her mother turned around and filled up her car with groceries for another family going through a tough time.

Many of our stories are about children whose mothers never made it obvious to them how difficult their lives were. Chapter 6 is called The Sacrifices She Made and its filled with stories of children having epiphanies about their selfless mothers. Elaine Herrin Onley, for example, always had the right clothing for school and social events. It wasnt until she came home from a party one night and spotted the ragged nightgown that was usually hidden under her mothers robe that she realized how much her mother had been sacrificing to keep her children looking good.