My mother is so great, I still live with her!
All jokes aside, my mother made some sacrifices for her four children that I don’t think many people would make. She worked jobs that destroyed her health, participated in some fraudulent activities to make ends meet and never even dated another man because she didn’t want to force another father on us (after all he did to her, my mother still made the four of us recognize and maintain a relationship with our father).
Now that I’m older, I’m starting to appreciate a lot of the little things she did for us. When I was very young, she used to take me to the library, inspiring a love for reading that literally no one else in my extended family has. Instead of being obsessively involved in the lives and learning of her children, like other mothers in my family are, she gave us the independence to do things alone and figure things out ourselves, while always encouraging us to do well. My mother might be the only person I know with no evil in her heart. She bears no grudges toward the man that made her life so difficult and cries over the deaths of people she barely knows. She has never had ill-will toward anyone, and our house has always been open for people to come over and eat. Even now, she shares grandmother duties with her aunt, even though my mother is not a grandmother, just because she’s used to always doing things for other people.
When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years back, it was a blow that rang through our entire extended family. She’s the reason I quit my well-paying job a few years ago so I could stay home and take care of her. She’s been cancer-free since, and I’m quite thankful for each additional day I have with her.