I Remember Momma

Editor's note: Each month, the CCW blog features one of our members. This month, T. Elizabeth Renich, author of The Shadowland Chronicles, reflects on a mother's influence.

T. Elizabeth Renich, right, and her mother in 2010.

When I was in high school, Momma would come down the hallway after supper to check on me and my brother. She’d stop at his bedroom. “Nathan, quit playing those computer games and do your homework.” There would be some mumbled response and reluctant compliance – he just needed to break through one more level to earn the bonus score…

A few steps later, she’d be in my doorway. “You need to quit writing those stories and do your homework.” And I would tell her just as soon as I finished up this last bit of dialogue between the hero and heroine…  

A decade later, my brother and I teased Momma about this routine. You see, my brother ended up being an international information technology director for a virtual reality computer games company, and I published a series of four Civil War novels. “So, Momma, what else don’t you want us to do?”

Today would have been Momma’s 72nd birthday, but she lost her battle with cancer last October. I think of her every day, and miss her so very much. I know now that I wouldn’t have been able to write my stories without the support she always gave. She allowed herself to be dragged to forts, battlefields, historic houses, museums, churches, libraries, prisons, court houses, graveyards, farms and deserts.

We traveled together on trains, planes and automobiles, plus buses and a paddle-wheeled boat. She accompanied me to sites in California, but also in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina, Minnesota, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado to collect accurate details to weave into my stories. She read only snippets of my manuscripts, and didn’t read each book upon its release. “I don’t have to read them,” she’d say, “I lived them with you.” Her investment of time, resources and love was exceeded only by her encouragement that I keep targeting my dreams.

Though she worked in libraries, reading wasn’t necessarily her choice of escape when she came home. After she retired and moved away from California, she had plenty of time to read. The first four books she had on her “To Be Read” list were mine. At long last, she read them from cover to cover, each title, pleasantly amused every time she could pick out the setting of a particular scene and say, “I was with you there, I remember that place.”

Momma was not only a positive influence on my writing, she was also an inspiration to me. I pray that if the LORD answers my petition for more words to write another book, that it will be one that she would have enjoyed. And that it will be a story that I hope many other readers will enjoy as well. I am confident that He has a plan – for me and my books.