Praising My Sister

Betsy called to give a three minute shout out to the best single mom she knows: her sister. 

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If you have anxiety, depression or any sense of the world around you, you know that not *everything* is going to be okay. In fact, many things aren’t okay and never will be! But instead of falling into the pit of despair, we’re bringing you a little OK for your day. Every weekday, we’ll bring you one okay thing to help you start, end or endure your day with the opposite of a doom scroll.

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The IGTBO team is Nora McInerny, Claire McInerny, Marcel Malekebu, Amanda Romani Grace Barry and Michelle Plantan.

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The transcript for this episode can be found here.

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Betsy: Hi, Nora and team. This is Betsy,  um, and I am sending you this it's going to be okay,  um, thought reflection.  Um, and it's mostly, you know, it's about my sister. Uh, it's about my big sister, Sarah Jo.  Sarah Jo had a really hard year this past year.

Um, it's the year she officially became a, we would call a single mom. Um, her ex husband, uh, you know, they got divorced and he moved to a different state and has not been providing much in the way of financial care,  um,  or assistance. And, uh, now that he is far away, he doesn't get to see the kids as often. Um, and so my sister now has the sole responsibility essentially of caring for her 4 kids, all 4 of them. Wow.

Holy cow. Um, all of them are under the age of 12. Um,  and she also has to have a full time job and take care of the house. And she had,  I think she believed she had a pretty magical childhood. She thinks that she had  some would say a perfect childhood.

She really  thought thinks that and wants to provide that for her kids as well. She wants her kids to have experiences.  And so she does everything she can, everything possible,  um, everything above and beyond, some would say.  And it was pretty apparent this past Christmas.  Um, I don't live in the same state as they do.

And so I came up to visit this Christmas and stayed with them for a few days. And,  you know, it  blows my mind what she does. My sister, um, she sews pajamas for all 4 of her children for Christmas. Um, she sews them and makes sure that they're ready for Christmas Eve. Um, she does this every year.

Um, she also, uh,  she has Santa's phone number. If you ever need to contact her, um, Santa,  my sister can contact him for you. Um, she confirmed that Santa would be providing all of his Santa gifts for her children this year,  um, confirmed that he did arrive and make sure they had their Santa presents.  They also had their stockings completely full. Um, so many gifts. 

We decorated Christmas cookies.  Um, they were homemade Christmas cookies. She made, like, I don't know, probably a hundred. And those were just the ones that we kept at the house. She had made dozens upon dozens of other cookies to go and give to other people.

Her church family and her kids' teachers and soccer coaches and all the things that you can think of.  She and her son, her oldest, sang in the church choir on Christmas Eve.  And her second oldest, um, lit the candles for Christmas Eve service at church.  She,  uh, on Christmas morning, she made fried dough for breakfast. You know, the kind you get at, like, the county fair or the state fair?

She made that for breakfast.  I mean,  when does she she just  she goes above and beyond.  And was every surface in the house spotless? No.  Was every, you know, are the girls, uh, her 2 youngest, they're 4 and 7.

Um, are there clean clothes just in a laundry basket in their room and they know to go look through them for clean clothes? Yeah. They know that. Yeah. Um, and so she's getting by, but she's doing a lot.

She's doing a lot. She's doing a lot. She, in addition to all of this parenting  and providing for her kids, she also made the best Christmas present I got this year, a Christmas present that made everyone in our family sob when they received it. Um, it's a cookbook made of recipes  and includes photos and things, um, you know, from, um, our grandmother who passed away about 6 years ago. Um, our grandmother, her name is Norma Cook.

Um, and so it's called the Norma Cook book.  Um, yes. Uh, we were call we're gonna call her mama Cook because that's what she,  um, is known by. Our family all knows her as mama cook and so did everyone else I knew. They always called her mama cook.

So  she,  um, yeah, she made this cookbook, and, uh, it's perfect. Tons all the recipes were directly transcribed from recipes that my grandmother had collected, and I had tons of photos of her and her family and her growing up. And,  um, yeah, it was perfect except for on the very front page, um, there's 1 typo, um, which I'm convinced my sister did on purpose to make sure that everyone knew that, uh, you know, she is human and she does make mistakes. Um, but yeah. So I don't know if there's some single moms out there who are struggling and I'm not saying that everyone should, you know, if my sister can do it, you can do it because that's not the case.

My sister has a lot of support from my parents and, um, um, her, um, ex husband's family as well. Um, and she but you know what? She's getting by.  So that's my it's going to be okay reflection.  Um, I hope you, uh, enjoy it.