I don’t know if you’ve ever been someone’s birthday present. I can tell you, though, it’s a pretty good gig.
My parents brought me home from the Clark County, Ohio, children’s home on Oct. 24, 1969, just two days before Mom turned 23. After four years of unsuccessful attempts to conceive, she was overjoyed to have a child and did something not at all uncommon at that time — she quit her job in the clerical department of a manufacturing plant in Springfield, Ohio, and stayed home to take care of me until I entered kindergarten.
In other words, I became her vocation.
Even after my sister, Jennifer, was born about a year and a half after I was adopted, the intensity of my bond with Mom was undiminished. So was her commitment to motherhood.
Mom took us to the park, lavished us with finger paint and Play-Doh, and taught us to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She brought me baseball cards and foil-wrapped chocolate footballs from the drug store a few blocks from our house and made spaghetti for dinner at least once a week because she knew these were my favorite things.
Moreover, Jen and I were utterly adored and fiercely protected.
The extent of Mom’s devotion crystalized in my mind one late-fall afternoon shortly after I began kindergarten at McGuffy Elementary School. An unexpected ice storm slicked Springfield’s streets and sidewalks, and we were dismissed from school early. Because McGuffy was only a few blocks from my house, I usually walked to and from school with a group of other kids. But for some reason, on this miserable afternoon, I tramped home alone, slipping and falling repeatedly, each slap against the pavement stinging me through my winter coat like bellyflops on a frozen pincushion. My clothes were soaked. And somehow, my underwear was ripped by my contorted and futile attempts to remain upright.
Finally, I arrived sobbing on our front porch.
Mom carried me inside, changed me out of my Garanimals, then hauled Jen and me to the school. She met the unsuspecting principal just outside his office as he was locking his door behind him to leave for the day.
Mom doused him with a forceful stream of invective, pointing her finger and jutting her chin high as she strained to maintain eye contact with a man two heads taller than her. With narrow eyes and contorted lips, she demanded justification for unleashing 5-year-olds into such nasty weather without notifying parents first. As my mother leaned in, the principal backpedaled until the locked door behind him blocked his retreat. At that point, he had no choice but to stand there and take it, palms pressed against the jambs.
I was not paying him close attention, though. My focus was on my mother. I had never seen her this angry. In fact, I doubt I heard her yell at someone more than three or four times in her life. I tingled to watch such uncharacteristic ferocity unleashed on my behalf. It made me feel … powerful … as if each growled syllable sent a charge to the battery pack powering my ego.
Throughout my life, Mom was always my biggest supporter. She was also my wisest counselor, as her handling of another of my travails demonstrated.
By the time I reached seventh grade, our family had moved to South Carolina. E.L. Wright Middle School invited students to submit New Year's resolutions just before the holiday break. The best ones were printed in the weekly newsletter that went home to parents, and their authors were to be awarded free ice cream from the lunch canteen when school was back in session after the break.
Instead of submitting a load of aspirational sap, I tapped my greatest strength—I was and remain a raging smartass.
“I’m going to turn over a new leaf this year,” I wrote. “I just hope this time, it isn’t poison ivy again.” Pretty corny, even for a smartass seventh-grader. But I won!
I could already taste the ice cream as the teacher passed out the newsletters during sixth period. I floated triumphantly into the Christmas break and onto the bus that afternoon, anticipating my classmates’ adulation.
Instead, a popular eighth-grade girl recited my resolution to the full bus and declared it the “dumbest shit” she had ever read. Everyone but the bus driver erupted in laughter. (And I’m pretty sure he snickered, too.) The boy sitting beside me broke into a squinting chuckle and elbowed me in the ribs. A warm tingle flushed my face, and my shoulders slumped.
Worse than the commentary, though, was that this girl and I had ridden the bus together every afternoon of the school year, yet even after a full semester, she did not seem to know that the writer she had just harangued sat a mere three seats away. In that moment, I wanted nothing more desperately than to disappear, yet somehow, my anonymity only intensified my humiliation. Is this always how people talk about me if they think I’m not around to hear?
When the bus stopped at my corner, I slinked off and skulked into the house. My clothes were dry and my underwear intact, but it was another ignominious late-fall arrival from school. I was still down in the mouth an hour or so later when Mom got home from work. She asked what was wrong.
“Nothing, just a long day,” I said, too embarrassed to tell her what happened.
I could tell she didn’t believe me, though. Mom was no dummy. It was Friday, and no matter how long or awful the school day had been, the holiday had arrived. I should have been jubilant, not pouty. For that matter, I should have been outside shooting hoops or fishing in the neighborhood pond.
Mom did not press me, however, and just asked to see the school newsletter.
Great. Now my dejection would make even less sense to her — I had won a contest and had my victory broadcast to the entire school. How was I to explain myself? I figured I might as well bare my indignity to her.
When I finished describing my journey of shame, Mom grabbed me in her arms and kissed me on top of my head, just as she had the doused and battered kindergartener she found crying on her porch in Springfield years earlier. However, rather than rushing us out the door to confront my assailant, she broke our hug and held me at arm’s length, one hand gently grasping my shoulder and the other lightly brushing up my bangs.
“Maybe that girl was just upset because she didn’t win the contest.”
Immediately, I brightened. This was genius! Such a thought had not occurred to me.
“I think your resolution was hilarious,” Mom added. “I know I’m your mom and I’m supposed to say that, but someone obviously agrees because you won the contest. They don’t just hand out free ice cream, you know.”
Yeah, damn right! I thought, nodding and firming my lips.
I did not decide to become a journalist that day — I still thought I would be a professional baseball player or, if that didn’t work out, maybe a lawyer. However, I would revisit the lesson Mom imparted that day many times in the years that followed. It was essential learning for anyone who writes for public consumption and who attaches their name to their work. Journalists need the crust of an armadillo.
As I got older, I realized that I did not have much trouble collecting my thoughts and committing them to paper. When I took an introductory journalism class during my sophomore year, I had found my calling. I wrote for Spring Valley High School’s student newspaper during my junior year and was editor-in-chief in my senior year. During the summer in between, I landed a part-time job covering high school sports for the daily newspaper in Columbia, which at the time had the state’s largest circulation.
I continued to work for The State’s sports department through college — I stayed in Columbia and attended the University of South Carolina — and thought I would have a job waiting for me somewhere in The State's newsroom when I completed my studies.
Unfortunately, in 1992, the year I graduated, the economy nosedived. To boot, my fiance dumped me. Just a few months earlier, I was sure I had my ducks in a row. But now, no job and no wife awaited me. I recoiled from rejection’s sting.
I considered going back to graduate school to get a teaching degree, then trying to find a job where I could be a high school baseball coach and newspaper advisor. But the September application deadline for grad school passed without my submission.
That October, four months after my college graduation, the sports editor at The Beaufort Gazette, Kevin Adams, called to gauge my interest in a job for which I had not applied. My college advisor knew I had covered sports for The State but had yet to find full-time work, so she passed my name along.
This was another of those providential moments in my life, but I sure did not recognize it at the time. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a sports writer. I really fancied myself a political reporter or investigative journalist — one day, maybe even a columnist. Covering high school tennis or youth baseball certainly was not my calling. I agreed to interview in Beaufort, anyway — what the hell else did I have to do? — but I was not enthusiastic.
Mom expected more excitement from me and subtly told me so.
“Wow, Jeff, you got recommended for a job you didn’t even apply for? I think that must say something about your ability,” she said, taking a seat on the couch in my bedroom. “You know, you sure have put a lot of work into becoming a journalist, and you’re such a good writer. You can always go back to school if this doesn’t work out, but maybe you should give this a shot.”
“Mom, it’s just an interview,” I said, trying to tamp her excitement and her expectations. “They haven’t offered me a job yet.”
“They will,” she said, smiling as she rose from the couch and left me alone in my bedroom to think.
She was right. About everything. Particularly the underlying topics we did not acknowledge.
The fact is, I had been languishing for months and feeling sorry for myself. Mom didn’t exactly kick me out of the house — she would never have taken such measures — but I had lived at home through most of college, and I think she knew I was getting too comfortable there. Teaching and coaching would have made a fine profession for me. Nonetheless, at the time, I did not need to spend two more years in grad school, farting off with classes that barely interested me and distracting myself with recreational softball and late-night drinking.
I needed to work. Mom knew it.
Yet, she prodded me toward this end by building me up rather than tearing me down.
So with growing enthusiasm, I made the 2½-hour drive for the interview on a Thursday morning. I interviewed with Kevin and The Gazette’s executive editor, Jim Cato, who called with a job offer soon after I got home that evening. That Saturday, I was back in Beaufort to look for an apartment, and I reported for my first day of work the next week.
At the time, I figured I would spend three or four years on the coast, then move along. More than 30 years later, though, Beaufort is still home — and all because Mom found a loving way to tell me I cannot throw a pity party every time things do not go as planned.
I needed this lesson again in July 2017. The hard part was doing it without the woman who taught it to me, the woman who had always been there to goad me forward.
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