by Patrick Caneday

Created on: May 05, 2009

While I'd love to tell the story of your mother today, I don't know her. So, let me tell you about mine. She's a pretty typical mom.

Darlene is a wife, a career educator, a retiree, a volunteer and the epitome of a grandmother amongst many other things. But most of all, she is a mother. A "mom" in the truest sense of the word.

The only child to Cecil and Wilhelmina, Darlene was born in the Depression and raised during WWII by parents that wanted to make sure their daughter had more than they did. They sent her off to college, because they never had the opportunity for themselves. She studied to become a teacher, the only job she ever wanted. As expected, she fell in love, got married, began having children and supported her husband as he went from the Air Force to medical school to practicing surgeon. This was the story of so many in her generation.

But times change.

With four children at home ages 2 to 14, her husband left her and the kids. Infidelity. When life deals you a blow like that, you've got to choose between folding or moving on; between the lifelong stain of bitterness and the hopeful optimism in knowing that all things will work out right in the end. Thankfully she chose the latter.

On the modest salary of an elementary school teacher she was able to buy her own home in a nice part of town just outside Los Angeles. Her job allowed her the time to be there as much as possible for her kids, delivering them to three different schools and sundry other activities each day, making sure they had a good dinner on the table every night. Being present is the one great thing any parent can do for their children.

Darlene would remarry to a good man, a stable and caring man. He brought with him three kids of his own to the house. Family portraits on the walls of their home display a smiling group clad in polyester and huge lapels and even bigger beehive hair so ubiquitous in the 1970's. Certainly there were smiles and good times for this extended family. But the "The Brady Bunch" it was not.

In the early years of her second marriage, Darlene's doting father, the man she adored more than anything in the world, would be taken from her by cancer at the age of 63, far too young. He was her rock and perhaps the sole reason she has the tender heart she does. Even today when she talks about him, you can see this woman in her 70's become a little girl all over again. Her eyes light up and her face beams with a child's smile when she talks about her daddy.

Not long

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