Mom's wheelchair rolled okay across the uneven grass. We parked her where the late-afternoon sun would hit her face and where the chickens were already at work, scratching at last year's straw like there was a mortgage on it. Bill stood a few feet behind. Malley put her big goofy head on her shoe and didn't move it for an hour. After, we ate ice cream. We laughed, wheezed, and chuckled.
It was a good day. The small kind. The kind I'm trying to learn to recognize as sacred before I have to learn it the other way.
This is a Mother's Day letter. It got long.
My mom raised me alone. My parents split before I have a memory of them being together — under two years old, the family lore says, though no one ever sat me down with a date. My dad died when I was six. From then on, the story of my childhood is a single woman in a nurse's uniform doing the math, alone, on how to keep kids alive and aimed at something better than where she started.
She is in her sixties now, and she lives with a genetic disease called CADASIL. It's small-vessel cerebral arteriopathy. The short version: the tiny blood vessels in her brain are giving out by slow degree. There is no cure. There is only the slope.
I have spent most of my adult life telling people my mother is the strongest person I know. I still think that. But this year, sitting next to her in the yard, watching her let other people care for her, I started to see that there are two kinds of strength, and I had only ever named one of them. The first kind built my whole childhood. The second kind is what she's teaching me now, and I think it might be the more important one.
What My Mom Taught Me About Strength
Most people use the word strength to mean a kind of pressing forward. The capacity to push, to absorb, to keep moving when the body and the schedule and the bank account would all rather quit. That is real, and I owe most of who I am to a woman who did it for thirty straight years without applause.
That definition is incomplete, though. I didn't know it was incomplete because I never saw the other half modeled until I started watching what CADASIL is asking of her now. The first kind of strength is what gets you through a Tuesday when you'd rather not have a Tuesday. The second kind is what lets you receive help from the world after a lifetime of being the one who gives it.
She had the first kind down cold. The second kind is the harder degree.
The Math No Kid Sees
I never saw her do the math.
She never stood at the kitchen counter at eleven at night with a pile of bills and a calculator where I could see her. She never let me watch her decide, in private, that I was going to play summer baseball whether or not it was technically affordable. She never let me see the shift swap she arranged so she could be at a parent-teacher conference. I saw none of it. As a kid, you don't see your mother carrying the weight. You see her packing your lunch. You see the band-aid going on. You see the dinner getting made.
You see it later. Specifically, you see it the first time you sit in your own yard with your own bills and try to do the math on what her decade as a single mother actually cost her. You realize the line items. You realize what got given up. You realize that the version of her you had as a kid was a calm front around a much rougher set of decisions.
That's the part nobody warns you about parenting backwards. The years you spent assuming your mom was simply, mysteriously, fine — those years are owed back. You owe her the recognition that she wasn't fine. She was working.
Buffalo, Then the VA
Mom was an RN her entire working life. She worked the floor at the hospital in Buffalo until I was finishing elementary school, and then she took a job at the VA in Sheridan, and we moved.
Sheridan is 30 minutes north of Buffalo on I-90, give or take. For people who don't live up here, that is not a move. For us, it was a move. It was a new school and a new neighborhood and a new commute and a new church and a new everything for a kid in sixth grade. She did it because the VA job was the better job, and the better job meant a better life for my sister and me. That was always the math.
What she did at the VA is the part I want people to understand. She wasn't in a sleepy department. She worked mental health. She worked hospice. Two of the heaviest specialties a nurse can choose, and she chose both, on purpose, for years. She spent her shifts inside the minds of veterans trying to find their way home from somewhere most of us can't picture. She spent her shifts at the bedside of people running out of time, helping them run out of time with some dignity attached.
Then she came home from that, made dinner, asked about my homework, and went to bed so she could do it again the next day.
I don't think I understood, until I was old enough to imagine doing that work myself, how genuinely rare she is. There is a tank for hard things inside her that I have never, in my own life, met the bottom of.
There is a tank for hard things inside her that I have never, in my own life, met the bottom of.
Kansas Is Flat
There is a joke we have run for twenty years and never gotten tired of.
I tell her I had to ride my bike to school in the snow, uphill both ways. In Sheridan, this happens to be more or less true. She fires back that she had to walk uphill both ways too.
"Mom. You're from Kansas."
"And?"
"Mom. Kansas is flat. They use Kansas as the example of what flat is."
She laughs. Bill laughs. We do the bit at every holiday and it lands every time, because the joke isn't really about Kansas. The joke is about a woman who will not be out-toughed on any claim of hardship, ever, by anyone in the room. Whatever you had, she had it worse, and she had it in a dress on a Tuesday with a baby on her hip, and she did not complain about it then either.
That refusal to be out-toughed is the engine of her whole life. It is also a piece of her I inherited, and I don't always know what to do with it. There is a version of me that runs harder than the situation requires because somewhere inside is a woman from Kansas, on a flat plain, claiming she walked uphill both ways. That woman built the engine. I just kept the keys.
CADASIL
We didn't have a name for what was happening to her until I was already an adult.
For years the picture was confusing. Migraines that didn't behave like migraines. Strokes that didn't always look like strokes on the first pass. Mood changes the doctors took too long to take seriously. CADASIL is hereditary and rare, and it goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for a long time in a lot of families because most clinicians simply haven't seen it before.
When the name finally came, it didn't change anything physical. It changed the shape of the future, though. It gave us a slope to plan against. There is no cure for CADASIL. The vessels keep failing. The strokes accumulate. Cognition, mobility, mood — the whole system narrows over time, and nothing in modern medicine reverses the direction.
For a woman who spent her life as the helper, this diagnosis is a particular kind of cruelty. CADASIL takes a person whose entire identity was built around being the one who shows up, and it slowly makes her the one who is shown up for. The role inverts. The pronouns change. The verbs change.
I watch her sit with that. I watch her get pushed in a wheelchair by the kid she used to push in a stroller. I watch her receive care from the same world she spent forty years caring for. The thing I notice most, the thing I keep writing this letter to try to name, is that she is not fighting it the way I would fight it.
The Strength That Lets Go
I have been around enough death and enough decline, partly through my mother's work and partly through life, to know that there is a stage at which a person either softens or hardens. Some people meet the slope by clenching against it. Some people meet it by letting go of one fist at a time.
Mom is letting go.
She lets Bill help her. She lets me show up. She lets the dogs lean on her, which she would have called a nuisance ten years ago and now calls Tuesday. She lets the chickens come close. She lets the sun on her face count for something on a day when there isn't much else on the schedule. She accepts the ice cream. She lets her future daughter in law call from far away and just be on the phone, catch up and laugh, just being there.
Watching this, I have started to suspect something I haven't said out loud until now.
I think CADASIL may be doing a piece of work in her that a lifetime of selfless service could not. It is teaching her, or maybe more accurately allowing her, to be the one who is received. To let the love come the other direction. To stop being only the giver and to be a person who is also gotten to.
That is not a small thing. That is, possibly, the harder lesson of a long life. The first kind of strength is what gets a single mom through thirty years on shift. The second kind of strength is what lets her be wheeled into the yard on a Sunday and not apologize for needing the help.
She is learning, in front of us, how to be received.
She is learning the second kind in front of us. I think she is learning it for us as much as for herself. I am taking notes.
Today, in the Yard
Sun on her face. Wheelchair on the grass. Chickens at her feet, dumb and busy. Bill nearby, doing what Bill does, which is mostly being available without making it a thing. Malley with her head on her shoe. Harley walking a perimeter only she understood. Prince, the cat, watching the whole assembly from a vantage point he chose for reasons he is not sharing. Ice cream slowly losing its argument with the sun. Dilyn's text through the phone of how proud she is while she passes RHOM (Rehab Hospital of Montana, where Mom made her first strides), the dogs going crazy at the sound of our laughs over bad jokes.
That was today. That was Mother's Day, 2026, in our family, in a yard in Sheridan, Wyoming.
It is not the loud version of love. It is not the version that gets bought at a counter and wrapped with a bow. It is the quieter version, the version where you wheel a woman who spent her career inside hospital walls out into the actual world for hours so she can watch her chickens act like chickens and feel the sun do its job on her face. The version that says, without saying it: you took care of us. Now we take care of you. We are not in a hurry. We are right here.
The Second Inheritance
The first paragraph of this letter was a hook about strength. I have to come back to it now, because the man writing this is a different one than the man who walked into the yard this afternoon.
I know what strength looked like in my mother for the first ... wow, damn near thirty years of my life. It looked like a uniform and a shift schedule and a kitchen light on at eleven at night. It looked like a woman who didn't have the option to fold, so she didn't fold. That version raised me, and everything I'm building now — the businesses, the books on the shelf, the way I treat the people who work with me — is downstream of that version of her.
What I didn't know, and what I am still learning, is that there is a second version of her strength that the first version was paying interest on the whole time. The strength to let other people in. The strength to be received. The strength to stop being the helper and let yourself be helped.
She is the strongest person I know. I have said this for years and meant it one way. I am saying it now and meaning it two ways. I will probably mean it more ways as the slope keeps moving and the lesson keeps deepening.
If I get this right, if I actually learn the second half from her, I think it will turn out to be the most important inheritance she gave me. The first half built the kid. The second half is going to build the man.
If your mom is alive, this is the part where I tell you to call her today. Not later this week. Today. Walk outside, look at the actual sky for a second, and dial. If she picks up, just be on the phone. You don't have to perform a holiday at her.
If your mom is gone, say her name out loud to someone you trust today. Tell them one specific thing. Not the polished line. The specific thing.
That is the whole assignment.
More Field Notes from Sheridan live at daltongoodyear.com, if writing like this finds you somewhere it is needed.
Anything here about money or results describes my own companies. It isn't typical and isn't a promise of yours. See the earnings disclaimer.
DG
Dalton Goodyear
Operator, writer and speaker in Sheridan, Wyoming. Hosting short-term rentals since 2017. Licensed Wyoming real estate broker and founder of Wyo Stays.
