It’s Five Minute Friday/Saturday! Maybe I should make it a goal next week to actually take the 5 minutes on Friday. This week, Lisa-Jo Baker has been doing a series on “What Mama Did,” where guests writers have shared stories celebrating their mamas. For Five Minute Friday, we all get to join in, too.  But it’s my mama.  Give me at least 10 minutes this week, okay?

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My grandmother whom we call Anna, my mama, and me.

I can’t come up with one story, one snapshot to tell you about my mama.  I’m wrapped up in my own motherhood right now, so all week (knowing this prompt was coming) I’ve found myself fascinated with the unseen things my mama did, the things that only now, as a mother myself, I have a glimpse of.

Everything I’m doing now… she did for me.  I’m stunned by that.  I understand Jesus more because of that.  And this phase I’m in is only a fraction of what she did.

She taught me piano and gave me music.  I only have five minutes, so take a minute to let that one sink in as it is.

She rolled my hair with hot-rollers every Sunday for church.  I was like five.  That one I think is funny now, but it was the early 90s and hair was still kind of big, and she’s a good southern girl from Augusta.

She patiently listened to me read every. single. sign. in the greater Stone Mountain area as I learned to read.

She and Dad set off on their own with me to Florida, leaving their family in Georgia behind because it was the path God paved.  I never once saw her complain about it, didn’t see tears in her eyes on days she must have been frustrated by being alone in a new place with only a 6-year-old to keep her company.

I’m an only child, and there was never a Summer I was bored.  We swam and swam and swam at the community pool, she took me to see movies, signed me up for Sea World Camp.  I mean, seriously, Sea World camp!  That must have cost a pretty penny.  And it was AMAZING.

She cleaned the aquarium of my goldfish, Ariel and Eric.  I think in hindsight we can put “my” in quotes since she did all the work, but she let me have all the credit.

When we would go out to dinner by the pet store, she and my dad would let me go inside to look at the hamsters and ferrets and bunnies.  And after doing that for a little while, I actually got to have a hamster.  Scratch that.  Three hamsters, consecutively.  One of them had to be put down.  Yes, put down, and my mother took care of that with me, too.

There was the time I was standing at the bus stop for school, and she called me back to the house and said that never mind, instead, we were going to go to Disney today with our friends who were in town on vacation.

She was unflappable, at least in front of me, when I was diagnosed with epilepsy.  EEGs, MRIs, specialists on the other side of town, extended absence from school to watch for reactions the medicine…  As far as I knew, this was normal, everything was under control, there was nothing to worry about.

I gave her a lot of attitude in middle school.  I think I’ll skip that era.  She’s a saint.

She drove all over Orlando with me to find a dress for my first homecoming.  And I probably gave her attitude during that, too.

On the topic of high school, she drove me across town every day for 2+ years so I could go to a performing-arts high school.

She always answers my phone calls, listens to my problems, patiently listens about the details of how I know when it’s time for Cora to nap and what the 19 different books I’ve read have to say about it.

She sets up a nursery in her house for my daughter, so that I don’t have to worry when we make the trip up.

She comes to visit us and makes dinner, washes the dishes and the parts of my breast pump while I’m on a date with my husband.

Mama keeps on doing… and now she’s Nanna, too.