Mom Extraordinaire

Lana and our grandson, Grayson

I take this moment to tell you about the best mom (and grammy) I know. This woman has a heart of gold, a love for her family beyond…well just beyond. She has sacrificed for her family in ways too numerous to list, in significant matters of the weightiest sort - the kind of dedication that would draw tears from even a James Bond villain.

Her love for her children (as a mom) and grandchildren (as a grand-mom) is an elemental part of who she is. She will defend them and take up for them against the highest odds. Beware those who would harm her progeny – beware! She will lay down her own life dreams for her family - can you imagine anything less getting in her way?

Most of all, she is crazy about her brood, her progeny, her fam. She smiles more when she’s with them. Laughs more. Enjoys more. Relaxes more. Has more fun. She loves her family more...than...anything.

I’m not talking about my own mom ,who was a saint, or my grandmother or even my daughter Piper, each of whom I put on the highest of motherly pedestals and with whom I share DNA. OK, they are the best moms I know too.

I am talking about my wife Lana.

Yes, she's not my mom, and yes it is Mother's Day, but bear with me.

I’ve seen for over 40 years of marriage what kind of a mother she is. I know more about her, have lived with her, watched her, more than any other mom in my life, and let me tell you just a little bit about about her.

First, she'll do anything for our kids. I mean it. She’ll give up anything she needs so her children can have what they need. She’ll drop anything she’s doing to help her daughter or son with their own children, or with their own challenges or opportunities. She’ll burst with pride - burst, I say - just to hear their smallest of accomplishments. And she'll scour up every resource she can manage, drum up every bit of her imagination, and charge up every bit of her energy to support their dreams and hopes. She is selfless in that way. Selfless, I say. Selfless.

Selfless.

Mothers have relationships with each other that the rest of us don’t share. My mom gave my sister Amy a book called Moments of Awareness, by Helen Lowrie Marshall, way back in 1976. I don’t know why I have this book now instead of my sis, but I have a poem in it marked, called Keep A Dream In The Making. Here it is:

Keep some little dream in the making
If youth you would like to hold.
Old Father Time is defeated by dreams—
A dreamer never grows old.
 
For dreams have a way of quickening
The heart, and the years pass you by.
You can always tell the man with a dream
By the ageless gleam in his eye.
 
So keep a small dream in the making.
It needn’t be big or bold—
Just some little dream to beckon you on
And you’ll never, no never, grow old.

Lana has an “ageless gleam” in her eye for the "dreams in the making" within her pups, those foals, her young’uns. That gleam does not flicker my friends. It shines as steady as she goes.

When Lana and I married, our preacher and his wife, the wonderful Leonard and Martha Gillingham, gave us a book by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman, titled streams in the desert . We’ve kept this book for over 40 years now, and as I was thinking about Lana I picked it up and happened to turn to something I had highlighted years ago:

“Because there are millions of roses we do not thank God for them, and yet the glory of creation is but as one rose flung down from the summer affluence of God”.

There are millions  of moms and it is easy to forget that each has given life, each has loved a child, and each is a unique yet timeless “rose flung down” into the lives of her babes and all her heirs. This Lana-red-rose has been our gift of the spirit, and has passed down her elegant splendor to the flowers which follow her.

Lana has literally taught thousands to dance, and shown each of us how to sing our song. If our children, and then our children’s children, and yet their children yet again had but one spirit to catch hold of, one teacher to learn from, and yes one model to aspire to, they could no better than the one who gave our children birth. Lana is the best mom I know.

All children should have the best mom they could ever know. I am quite sure my son and my daughter did, do, and will.

Moms.

Lana.

Best-In-Show.

She's also very, very humble. I had a hard time finding pictures of just her (unlike all those pictures I could find of myself...sigh...). Others always come first with Lana Kroth.