Promises Made // Promises Kept

I owe so much to my mother. Over the course of my life she’s never stopped believing in me. She’s always been the first to tell me I could accomplish something. To tell me that I should go for that thing, whatever it might be, because she wholeheartedly believed I could do it.

It was never about money, even though she had to work so much to make ends meet for us. To make sure we had food in the kitchen for a growing boy with a seemingly bottomless stomach at times. She worked, I went to school, and sometimes we argued, but, at the end of the day we’d talk about movies and books and what it might be like for me to write those things some day.

“Go for it,” became a mantra, but only one I recognized years later, well after the fact.

We lost touch for a short period of time. Right after high school graduation. I was told I needed to move back to Iowa to be with my dad, where I’d go to college at a local community school and then, maybe, move onto a university somewhere else.

We didn’t separate on good terms. Even to this day I regret that stretch of time because I missed some big moments in my mother’s life. And she was estranged from me when I enlisted in the military and, ultimately, came back home. I only found out later that she’d moved herself and her dog halfway across the United States, ending up in a ridiculously small town in Texas.

But we eventually fell back into the rhythm. I made more mistakes, but she never blamed me for them. Never told me I was less than, or that she didn’t appreciate the small positive things I was doing. She helped when I needed it the most, and sometimes when I didn’t need it all that much. No matter when it happened, I was always grateful for her assistance.

Grateful for her love.

I never made any promises directly to her. I’m not in the business of making promises to people because I don’t want to let them down. But, I did make her promises in my head. To myself. Aspirations that I wanted, more than anything, to accomplish because I wanted to give something back to her.

She deserves that. No matter how much I may ever be able to give back to her, she deserves so much more.

So I made promises. But keeping promises is something else entirely, especially when it’s on such a great big stage, and it’s all so damn important.

One of those things I told myself was that, some day, I would be able to repay her with some amount of money. Not just a hundred dollars, or even a thousand. Something more. Something substantial. Something that could actually help her not only at the moment, but also in the long run.

I researched for a week after I found the little black notebook on the small table stationed out in front of a local restaurant. I went inside, spoke to the owner, the manager, a few of the waiters, and even some of the patrons. No one recognized the notebook, and no one had seen anyone leave it behind.

The manager asked if I wanted to put it in the lost and found, but I couldn’t do it. Not because the notebook itself appeared to be special, but what was inside it. Tucked away in the middle of the blank pages was a stack of cash. $20,000 in total.

My heart almost jumped out of my chest when I found it. And then, by the time a week had come and gone, I finally came to terms with the fact I could keep it. Sure, there were still strings in the back of my head saying that someone had obviously lost that money, all that money, but I’d waited a week. I went back to the restaurant every single day, waited at the same time, but no one ever came to claim the small black notebook or the money inside it.

Of course, my lizard brain jumped to the forefront immediately. What could I buy with $20,000? A newer, bigger TV. More video game systems. I could put some away into savings, sure, but where’s the fun in that? I’ll always have time to do that, right? $20,000 doesn’t just fall into your lap every day of the week.

But then she called, and seeing her smiling face there on my phone’s screen reminded me of the promises I’d made. I was right: this kind of money doesn’t just happen all the time, and I owed it to my mom to show her I could keep those promises. Even if I’d never made them directly to her.

I answered that call, but I told her that I’d have to call her back. She obliged, and then I set off towards her house. An easy 30-minute drive and I pulled up into the parking lot of the apartment complex she’d been living in for the last three years. She was already outside, as if she knew to wait.

“Decided to start the conversation face-to-face?” She asked, smiling that sarcastic smile she sometimes had.

“That, and I have a surprise for you,” I said, walking up to her and giving her a tight hug. The kind of hug I hadn’t given her in a long while, finally rectified.

“I love surprises,” she said, returning the embrace. “What is it?”

I pulled the small black notebook out from behind me and handed it over to her. She eyeballed it, skeptical, before finally taking it.

I pictured the individual bills getting caught in the breeze and floating away as she opened the cover. “Careful when you open it,” I said, hoping to avoid that particular outcome.

She opened the notebook carefully, and the pages moved for her, opening to the middle. Where the money waited. She stared at it, dumbstruck by the president’s face staring back at her. Without looking up at me, she asked, “What is this?”

“Promises kept,” I said. “Finally.”

“How — how much is this?”

“It’s $20,000, mom. And it’s all yours. You deserve it for everything you’ve done for me, and for anyone else who’s ever come into your life.”

When she looked up, her eyes were moist and reddened. It hurt a little to see her cry, because it instantly resurfaced memories of our time with my abusive father, but I knew this was different. These were, for all intents and purposes, happy tears.

They fell down her face as she hugged me again. I could feel the moisture staining my shirt, but I just held her back. We both squeezed and held one another, finally letting the tension that we’d silently been holding on to for years relax.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, stepping back and closing the notebook. “I can give you some of the money.”

I shook my hands and my head adamantly. “No, no. I mean, it’s your money and you can do whatever you want with it, but you’ve already given me enough. You’ve done so much for me already. So use that money for yourself. Okay?”

She nodded. “Okay. Thank you. So much.”

As I drove away, heading home, I realized I could pat myself on the back. Tell myself, “Job well done” and chalk this up for my Good Deed of the Day. And there would probably be some out there who would say those things, tell me that I didn’t actually do it for my mother at all, but I gave her the money to feel good about myself.

They’d be partly right. It does feel good to do things for other people. And it should. We should feel good about doing good. But that doesn’t inherently mean we’re not doing it for the right reasons. It doesn’t mean that we expect anything in return, either.

We should all do more for one another. And sometimes, when a pile of money falls into your lap, that means handing it all over to the person in your life who deserves it the most.

Even if it means you don’t get that bigger, better TV quite yet.