My mom had helped our family avert meltdown over how we kids lined up to wait for the bus with her chart and our lines in the gravel. I suppose, then, that we should have felt guilty that our sibling rivalry issues flared up again every December. A mother who stays home with her children through their formative years should expect much more from her children, right? (Don’t answer that. I have lived it from the other side of the coin now. Not as a stay-at-home mom, for the record, but as the husband of one.)

My mom loved to cross-stitch. We had her works of art all over the house. One that hung in my boyhood room and now hangs in the cabin just over...

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