Where does one begin to tell the story and weigh the loving impact of the mothers in their life? You’ve got a story. Not a perfect one – no one’s is. But one marked with enough love, support, and providence to know you would not be who and where you are today without them. I know I wouldn’t be. And I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about them.

Mary Whitston was a farmer’s wife, widowed at 38, while expecting her only child. With little education and no capacity to work the land, she left it all to her departed husbands’s family and moved to the cotton mill city of Moultrie, Georgia. Her sister Eulala Boatwright made the journey with her. One worked the first shift, the other the second, living in a mill-village four-room house. They raised that child. Eulala never married and lived to be 97, owning her health and vitality to the fact that she never had to live with a man. That daughter, whose birth certificate shows her as named after her dad, often said she would never have known which of these two women was her mother had she not been told. It was a non-traditional family before it was cool. And what a job they did.