Meeting your mother for the first time is the most important event in my life, and sadly, I don’t clearly recall how it happened. We were 14-years old, freshmen in high school. We didn’t have a class together, but we would have passed each other in the halls each day and at some point we must have been introduced. I’d give anything to go back and experience it all again — the first time I saw your mom, the first time we spoke. Just to imagine it is a thrill. What I do remember that first year of high school is thinking that she was beautiful. Her voice, with that slight, unidentifiable accent, and her lively and pleasing laugh made her even more so. A friend of mine on the football team made the case one day at practice that your mom had the best legs in our class. He was right.

The more I got to know your mom, the more I liked her. She was sweet, well-liked, an honor student, and she didn’t ever curse, which was a rarity among our high school classmates. In retrospect, it was only that I happened to be blindly infatuated with someone else that I didn’t ask her out sooner. The other part to this was that I didn’t think I was good enough for her.

At that age, I was immature, acting out, in a near constant state of rebellion. What I was rebelling against, I don’t know. Rules? A perceived lack of freedom? My right as a know-nothing teenager to live exactly how I saw fit? Whatever it was, were it not for your mom, it’s possible that I would have never pulled myself together. Your mother was instrumental in reshaping my priorities, and in doing so, literally turned my life around. The lesson I take away from that experience and wish to pass on to you now is just how important it is to surround yourself with people that have good values. Kids who are non-judgmental, kind, and positive. Kids who have a solid work ethic and stay out of trouble. The type of people who brighten your day and inspire you to be the best version of yourself. For me, more than anyone else I met in high school, that person was your mom.