Jenna and One of the Strong Women

Please welcome back each of our calendar bloggers as they join us for another week as the featured blogger of the week (FBW). This time they are sharing stories of survival and photos of the strong women in their lives. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

Is it corny to write a post about how your mom is the strongest woman you know? If so, I don’t want to be un-corny.

My mom is the strongest woman I know.

I came on the scene a little earlier than she and my dad expected. She was young. He was young. I was loud. And still, they made it work. She finished college. And kept finishing college. She pursued the heck out of her education, even though I was always there, being loud. And then she pursued her career, first with me just being loud and then my brother joining in with his volume.

In doing so, she taught me that being a mother doesn’t have to define who you are. She was always there at our stuff — softball, concerts, plays, awards banquets — but she had a life, a career, a set of friends. She pushed me harder than she pushed my brother — because I was going to be a woman someday. She endured horrible things at work simply because she was a woman and wanted me to understand what my journey could be like.

She has beaten breast cancer. She has lived through relationship woes with my dad and come out on the other side. She has taken care of my grandmother since grandpa died. She has loved my sons more than any Grandma on earth has ever loved a grandson. She is patient. She is kind. She is funny. She is tough, but she is real.

And she loved me even when I wasn’t all that love-able.

Jenna blogs at Stop, Drop & Blog and The Chronicles of Munchkin Land. She has been blogging for ten years. She is a freelance writer and photographer living somewhere in Ohio with her firefighter be-mustached husband. She is an everyday mom to two little boys and a birth mom to an amazing Munchkin. Her photographer is Courtney Paris of Lousville Boudoir.