Three years ago, after we had moved to Virginia and settled in our new house, I was browsing Amazon for some wall decor and stumbled onto a piece with a quote I had never read before: They whispered to her, “You cannot withstand the storm.” She whispered back, “I am the storm.”
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When I was in high school, every summer my youth group would do a “senior sendoff” to those who had just graduated. It was a chance for them to celebrate their accomplishments, say, “good-bye,” and share their plans for the future. A couple of the guys were joining the ROTC corps at a university a couple hours away. I had no doubt that they would both succeed, so it came as a surprise when several months later, I learned that one of them was regretting his decision.
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Last week was hard…very hard. Hell Week at VMI concluded the Sunday before, and I was relieved that Tommy was at least past that step. Classes were set to start, and on the first day, there was bit of a snag. I tried to help Tommy but ended up making things worse. I felt terrible.
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Tommy, my oldest, matriculated at VMI this last Saturday. To say it was an emotional day would be an understatement. He was about to embark on the hardest, most challenging thing he’s ever done in his life so far—possibly ever. We all knew this going into it. The program is designed to find people’s limits and push them past them.
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As you know from my At the End Was a Rainbow post, my oldest son, Tommy, will be attending VMI this fall. The school’s tagline is “No ordinary college. No ordinary life.” And the journey he’s about to embark on is anything but ordinary.
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Hello, friend. It’s been a while. A long while. The last time I posted anything was the beginning of 2024 right after my breast cancer scare. Not too long after that, I had a pinched nerve that left me incapacitated for about two months. Then Thomas had his own cancer scare—thankfully, like mine, it ended up also being benign. As the holidays in the latter part of 2024 approached, I was ready to put the year of unfathomable challenges behind us and welcome a new year with a fresh start. Little did I know they were only a warmup for what was to come.
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Thomas and I celebrated our anniversary last Saturday. Something you might find interesting is we married eleven months and three days after our first date. No, I wasn’t pregnant, lol—our first born didn’t come until several years later. Actually, I still had two years left of college when we said, “I do”—I was only twenty-one at the time.
I’m a graduate from The University of Texas at Austin, but I didn’t major in either English or Creative Writing. In fact, I wasn’t even in the School of Liberal Arts (“school” is how the university subdivides their specialties). Believe it or not, I was part of the Business School.