Sitting in the car with my mother, I kept quiet. I’d already said enough.
It was Thursday. My project on the state of North Carolina was due Monday. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Ballard, had made that clear months ago.
If I excelled at anything at school, it was in selective hearing.
We drove in silence through my hometown of Kernersville and came to a small building across the street from Greenfield’s Farm and Garden Store. My mother knew you could rent a typewriter there.
Justin Cox
This was 1990. The work of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and their personal computers hadn’t reached me yet. I was still a year away from knowing the joys of Oregon Trail.
Because we did not have a computer, I was given the option to complete the project by hand. I imagine many others were too.
My mother said the typewriter would be faster. She worked in medical offices. Her fingers were proficient on a keyboard.
I also think the choice was an unspoken response to her pride — she wanted her child’s project to look as good as anybody else’s.
Good mothers do such things.
Walking out of the store, the IBM WheelWriter weighed as much as my procrastination.
We left and went to the library. We checked out books on North Carolina history. My mother plopped her pocketbook on the sizeable Xerox. She fed it loose change as we photocopied images out of magazines and encyclopedias.
We drove around and collected brochures from North Carolina attractions. Old Salem. Grandfather Mountain. The Lost Colony. Tickets for the upcoming 1991 season cost $10 for adults and $4 for children 12 and under.
Returning home, we unloaded all our materials on the kitchen table. Papers spread out, highlighters flying, pages bookmarked. We looked like two detectives poring over a crime scene.
This was fitting since I was sure she was going to murder me.
Fortunately, I survived and knew several things by Sunday evening.
I knew North Carolina’s state shell was the Scotch Bonnet. I can still tell you the Latin, phalium granulatum.
I knew the state gem was the emerald.
I knew all the major rivers. Catawba, Yadkin, Pee Dee, Cape Fear, Neuse, Tar, Roanoke, Chowan.
I knew former Presidents Andrew Johnson and James Knox Polk were born here.
I knew tobacco and textiles ran our state.
I knew John Merrick, Aaron M. Moore and a young man from Columbus County named Charles Spaulding helped make North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance a leading Black-owned business in the United States.
But most importantly, I knew my mother loved me.
Mothers embody a type of good news that is shamefully often overlooked until one is older.
As children, we think their actions are normal.
At 10 years old, I assumed everyone had someone in their lives willing to lose a weekend. I did not yet understand what it meant for someone to carry responsibility that is not technically theirs and still do it with devotion.
I know better than to assume such now. I have children of my own and see things differently.
I realize my mother probably could have used a quiet weekend rather than spend three days listening to me sigh dramatically about North Carolina history.
Yet there she was — showing up the way she always did.
A holy act if there ever was one.
The word “holy” typically evokes the image of large, quiet sanctuaries. Opulent iconography. Stained glass that costs more than a year’s worth of college education in 2026.
That’s not the kind of holy I’m talking about here.
No, this is every day holy. Loaves and fishes. Dust and breath. Wine and cup. Ordinary things transformed into vessels of grace.
Mothers are holy vessels.
“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”
The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray got it right. He wrote, “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”
Children know this to be true.
They watch the women in their lives wake up tired and still choose to care. They see women absorb panic and return steadiness.
They witness the meaning of sacrifice even before they know the word.
In my case, I had a mother who stood in the gap between me and the full consequences of my own forgetfulness.
Love like that shapes a person.
She spent three days hunched over a typewriter. I sat beside her like a shadow, listening to the clack of her keystrokes turn a pressured deadline into words.
I submitted the project on Monday. My mother returned to work to get some rest.
“We” got an A.
I know this because my mother saved it. Just like she did with many of the things I made in school. Christmas ornaments that still hang on her tree every December. A spooky painted wooden ghost that has since lost one of its googly eyes still materializes every Halloween. The D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) essay award I won in fifth grade is tucked away in a closet.
She kept it all. Proof that I was worth the trouble.
That’s what I remember the most.
Justin Cox received his theological education from Campbell University and Wake Forest University School of Divinity and McAfee School of Theology, where he received his doctor of ministry. He is an ordained minister holding standing in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and American Baptist Churches USA. When not spending time with his spouse and daughters, he can be found writing and baking late into the night. His thoughts and reflections are his own.