Excerpt: 'Chicken Soup for the Soul: Thanks Mom'

Read an excerpt from a book about love, graditude and family.

ByABC News via logo
May 4, 2010, 12:48 PM

May 5, 2010— -- The authors of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" compiled stories about love, compassion and, most of all, mothers.

In the foreward, former "Good Morning America" anchor Joan Lunden writes about how it was her mother, not her globetrotting father, who brought out the adventurer in her, telling her to "hitch your wagon to a star."

Read the excerpt below, and then head to the "Good Morning America" Library to find more good reads.

Foreword

For the first thirteen years of my life I lived an idyllic childhood in a small suburban community in Northern California. My mother was a stay-at-home mom to my brother and me, and my father was a prominent physician in the community. My parents had struggled to have children, and they finally adopted my brother Jeff as a newborn baby. They brought my brother home when he was just three days old. Mom's friends came to give her a shower; however she was in the bathroom sick to her stomach. Little did she know, she was pregnant with me! As soon as she stopped trying to have a baby, she must have become less stressed, and she got pregnant and carried me to term with no difficulties. So I was born less than eight months after my brother Jeff, and we were raised, essentially, as twins.

My dad was an avid private pilot, and we travelled a lot as a family in our plane. When I was thirteen years old, my father needed to fly to Southern California on a short business trip to speak at a medical convention. He had asked my mom, my brother and me to accompany him since it was a brand new plane. Mom said no, thinking we shouldn't miss school. She later changed her mind, picked us up and drove to the airfield (no cell phones in those days to call and say we were on our way). As fate would have it, just as we pulled up to the runway, my father's plane was lifting off the ground. We missed him by a moment. I stood and waved goodbye, totally unaware that this was the last time I would ever see my father. His plane crashed during a bad storm, in Malibu Canyon returning home.

I'll never forget the knock at the door in the middle of the night when the police officer came to tell us that my father's plane was missing and they feared the worst. My mom had been up all night waiting, worrying and was now weeping uncontrollably. Life can change in an instant, and that night would change our family forever. My mother became a widow at age forty, with two young teenagers. She had been active in the community but she was not a career woman; she had devoted herself to raising us. However now she had to take the lead in our family and had to support us as well. So while dealing with her grief, she also went back to school, got her license to sell residential real estate and joined the forces of working moms.

We were typical teenagers; we just wanted life to be the same. I was also a stridently independent young woman and challenged my mom every step of the way. When I grew up and became a working mom, and later a single working mom, I often thought of how I had challenged her and how tough I was on her. So this is not only a "Thanks Mom" but also a "Sorry Mom!"

Mom had always been ferociously protective of us; our home was surrounded by a big wall, perhaps modeled after homes in Mexico, where my parents often vacationed. My brother joked that we weren't allowed outside the big wall. But my mom actually worked very hard to make sure that we were exposed to a lot -- museums, ballet, theater, circus, trips, and foreign countries. She wanted us to see the world, to "broaden our horizons" -- those were her words.

My mom also made sure that she always talked about my dad, and how he had saved so many lives and taken care of so many families, so that my brother and I didn't lose his influence on what we should do with our lives.

My dad had been born in Australia, raised in China before coming to America where he became an oncologist, and spoke several languages. He was a world traveler, yet I think it was my mom who really made me the adventurer that I am. She would often tell me to "Hitch my wagon to a star." She wanted me to know no boundaries and to always reach for the stars. Mom constantly told me that I would do great things with my life. Those were positive affirmations that had a long-term effect. An important ingredient for success is self-confidence, and I got a huge dose from my mom every day.

While a parent might naturally want to keep children near and protect them, it's important to let children go and expose them to new things. When I was graduating from high school I had applied to several colleges. However my mom had other plans for me. Unbeknownst to me, Mom actually took my college essay and filled out an application for me to attend World Campus Afloat, a university aboard a ship that travelled around the world. She told me about her clever deed when I was accepted. That three-month experience changed me and my expectations of life dramatically. It was actually a very selfless act for a widowed mom. I had skipped grades in school so I was only sixteen when I set off for that college adventure round the world and she could have tried to keep me closer to home, but instead she made sure that I had an amazing growth experience.

My mom's influence on my brother and me was enormous. She always wanted us to have a positive attitude, to always try to do the best we could. My mom's friends had always called her Hap, which was short for Happy. And no wonder -- she always saw the glass as half full, and taught me to approach each day with a smile. Mom tried to teach us to be fair, to care, to have integrity and to think big.