I burst through the door in her room. “Mom! She is taking an extra turn on the video game! She promised to let me play when she died, and she wouldn’t let me!”

I immediately regretted my decision. In my rage at my sister’s video game injustice, I failed to realize exhausted my mom was. It was Sunday afternoon, after a long three-hour block at church, and she had been dead asleep for only an hour.

I looked at her back as she faced away from me, the covers pulled up over her ribs, and I knew she was awake, but she barely spoke above a whisper. “Please handle it yourselves and let me sleep.”

“Okay, okay, Mom, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woke you. Go back to sleep.” I retreated out of the room quietly and closed the door. But of course she couldn’t sleep.

It was 1992, and I was 13 years old. The sixth of seven children, I was the man of the house now. My older sister, Marnae, at 16, was always sneaking out and causing problems, and my younger sister Sheri, at age 10, was forever trying to get me into trouble. (The older four kids were already out of the house, married or divorced and raising their children). But I saw myself as the rock in my mom’s life, the one that could help ease her burdens a bit. I felt terrible for having interrupted the nap.

I decided to make up for it by making dinner. I scanned our cupboards, finding cans of chicken soup, crispy fried onions, and Rice-A-Roni there, and in the fridge was butter, milk, and a few essentials. I could cook all of this up and them Mom wouldn’t have to work this afternoon, she could rest.

As Sheri and Marnae kept fighting over the video games in the next room, I thought of how much our lives had changed in the past few years. In 1990, just after I’d finished the fourth grade, Mom had made the boldest move of her entire life; she left her husband. After over 20 years together, seven children, and a move across the country, she couldn’t take anymore of Dad’s depression, crippling debt, constant yelling and fault-finding, or the long crying spells. Though it had been good in the beginning, the last decade plus (right around the time I was born and afterward), Dad had been steadily declining. So Mom, in her mid-40s, packed a U-Haul full of keepsakes and left Missouri.

For two days, we had driven back to Idaho, where we’d moved back in with her parents for a time. Mom found work at a small-town Idaho school, using the teaching degree she had earned back before she’d had children, and rented a small brick house next door to the Mormon church, in a town that had less than 500 people. We registered in to new schools and our new lives began.

I wouldn’t understand for several more years how difficult this patch of life must have been for my mom. Many years later, as I faced my own divorce with two young dependent children, when I moved from a four bedroom home into a one-bedroom apartment and from financial security to massive amounts of debt, then I would begin to understand. Mom’s entire future had been built up in her marriage. She’d prepared for marriage through her entire adolescence, and she’d supported Dad through thick and thin. She’d carried seven babies and raised them, each with their own struggles and challenges. She’d had many joys, but she’d faced many hardships as well. And now, with the divorce final and three children remaining at home, she must constantly wonder what the future held for her. At 14, I simply lacked the capacity to see her courage, her unwavering strength, and the utter emotional exhaustion and devastation she must have been facing at the time.

When she left Dad, there might have been hope for a reconciliation. Maybe this would be the wake-up call that he would need to finally climb out of the hole he had dug for himself. But instead, he’d only gotten farther away, more angry, more critical. He’d sold the home, berated her for leaving, and moved himself to Las Vegas. He didn’t call us, he saw us maybe once per year, and he didn’t pay an ounce of child support. She was on her own now.

Earlier in the day, in sacrament meeting, I’d seen Mom wince, almost silently, and a few tears leak down her cheeks when one of the women in our Mormon congregation had stood up to bear her testimony of the power of marriage. She’d discussed her gratitude and love for God for providing her such an incredible husband to share her life with, and she’d professed that all who worked to keep God in their marriage could be successful and find happiness. After that, I’d gotten up to bear my own testimony, sure to tell the congregation how blessed I was to have an incredible mother who was my best friend and who sacrificed everything for her family. She was my greatest, and only, example of heroism in my direct life.

I worked quickly to prepare dinner, accidentally knocking a bag of sugar over, several cups’ worth of it spilling onto the floor before I noticed. Then as I was cleaning it up, the glass bowl that I had set on the burner, full of water and set to boil, exploded into a million billion shards that cascaded across the room; somehow I didn’t realize at the time that glass bowls couldn’t be heated from the bottom up. The explosion woke Mom up and she saw the kitchen littered with sugar and glass shards. I was worried she might cry, but somehow the sight of it was just ridiculous.

Mom got a broom and a dustpan and sat down next to me on the floor to start cleaning up the mess. She knew I’d only been trying to help.

“Sorry, Mom. I love you,” I said, a guilty, humbled expression on my face.

She looked past her exhaustion and saw me there. “I love you, too, Chad.”

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!