This week's Encouragement was submitted by: Todd Allen, written by Matt McNeil to his mother Karen McNeil
Here's a Mother's Day story for my mom, Karen Mcneil.
When I was growing up, my parents' house had a pond behind it. Not an artificial goose-toilet of a pond that get thrown up in new developments, but a pond that had been there for years and was flourishing. And when we moved into that house, the pond was teeming with fish. Big fish. Mostly bass, easily two feet long, maybe three. With just a piece of bread and net, my friends and I could easily catch a few at a time.
When I was in probably the third or fourth grade, the pond's levy broke. Well, this being the 1980s rather than the 1880s, city engineers realized the levy had a problem that needed to be fixed. So rather than it breaking , they broke the levy, and all that water and all those fish spilled out on the parking lot of the propellor factory that was down the hill and behind our house. I was horrified to see all those fish strewn across the parking lot flopping from side to side and gasping for air. As a sensitive kid who loved animals, I hated the sight of this. My mom saw this too, and wasted no time--she was going to do something to help. Which, I think is just like her.
She grabbed a couple of buckets from the garage and we cut through the woods to that parking lot. First she filled the buckets with pond water and told me to start picking up fish. If you've ever seen a fish out of water, it's easy to call to mind the flopping and gasping. But multiply that a hundred times over to get a sense of the scene. It was a killing field, and so unsettling I froze. Here were these living things struggling to stay alive who I desperately wanted to help and I froze. Mom on the other hand wasted no time and started bare handing these writhing, flopping fish, pinning them to the ground so they would stop moving long enough so she could get her hand around it. And then she picked them up one by one and saved them from suffocation. After the bucket was full, we would take them to the storm drain and drop them in, where they would hopefully get spit out into another body of water.
In all I picked up one fish. A single fish. I felt like a failure. Mom bailed me out by assigning me the task of carrying the bucket as she saved dozens of fish. We might have looked super weird as there were a lot of people watching this spectacle and we were the only ones (at least that I remember) wading in to try to save fish. I'm grateful for a mom who was not content to just watch as innocent creatures suffered. I'm glad she cared enough and was crazy enough to do something about it. Happy Mother's Day, Mom!
When I was growing up, my parents' house had a pond behind it. Not an artificial goose-toilet of a pond that get thrown up in new developments, but a pond that had been there for years and was flourishing. And when we moved into that house, the pond was teeming with fish. Big fish. Mostly bass, easily two feet long, maybe three. With just a piece of bread and net, my friends and I could easily catch a few at a time.
When I was in probably the third or fourth grade, the pond's levy broke. Well, this being the 1980s rather than the 1880s, city engineers realized the levy had a problem that needed to be fixed. So rather than it breaking , they broke the levy, and all that water and all those fish spilled out on the parking lot of the propellor factory that was down the hill and behind our house. I was horrified to see all those fish strewn across the parking lot flopping from side to side and gasping for air. As a sensitive kid who loved animals, I hated the sight of this. My mom saw this too, and wasted no time--she was going to do something to help. Which, I think is just like her.
She grabbed a couple of buckets from the garage and we cut through the woods to that parking lot. First she filled the buckets with pond water and told me to start picking up fish. If you've ever seen a fish out of water, it's easy to call to mind the flopping and gasping. But multiply that a hundred times over to get a sense of the scene. It was a killing field, and so unsettling I froze. Here were these living things struggling to stay alive who I desperately wanted to help and I froze. Mom on the other hand wasted no time and started bare handing these writhing, flopping fish, pinning them to the ground so they would stop moving long enough so she could get her hand around it. And then she picked them up one by one and saved them from suffocation. After the bucket was full, we would take them to the storm drain and drop them in, where they would hopefully get spit out into another body of water.
In all I picked up one fish. A single fish. I felt like a failure. Mom bailed me out by assigning me the task of carrying the bucket as she saved dozens of fish. We might have looked super weird as there were a lot of people watching this spectacle and we were the only ones (at least that I remember) wading in to try to save fish. I'm grateful for a mom who was not content to just watch as innocent creatures suffered. I'm glad she cared enough and was crazy enough to do something about it. Happy Mother's Day, Mom!
