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Cornelius News

Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Mother’s Day

By Allen T. Gunn. “Allen’s gift for Mother’s Day is cleaning out the storage unit.” Simple words said by a mother with such excitement. A simple gesture that means the world.

I shrug my shoulders and responded, “If that’s all you want.”

Mother’s Day shouldn’t be complicated, even though I have two mothers.  It doesn’t take much to please two of the most loving ladies who together adopted me as an infant from a civil war torn and impoverished Guatemala in 1991.

My mothers Nancy Gunn and Mary Allen Watson have been together 37 years.

They had already done the same four years earlier, going through a grueling waiting process for my brother Thomas. They wanted to share love and extend an opportunity for a substantially better life.

For me, it’s been so stereotypical, no matter how different or unique our family appears to the outside world. There have been the usual teenage groundings and great learning moments, but equally a load of laughs.

That storage unit is packed full of memories I’ve shared with both my mothers, which is why it is hard to dwindle down the numerous boxes that have moved from North Carolina to Massachusetts and back again, twice over.

A T-shirt from the Metallica concert — my first ever — that I nearly missed because my brother and I sat in the wrong section and when Mary Allen arrived we were nowhere to be found, to ticket stubs from various Carolina basketball games I’d attended with Nancy. They are the memories accounted for on Mother’s Day.

Nancy and Mary Allen have made them possible by giving me a chance to have my own success that I can share with them. And even though Mother’s Day falls yearly on the second Sunday in May, it’s an appreciation I try to repay every day.

Let’s just say I “organized” those memories.

—Allen T. Gunn

Allen, 26, has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Salford in Manchester, England. His parents are Nancy Gunn, a retired social care worker, and Mary Allen Watson, who retired from the teaching at the university level. They remember word-for-word the call that brought Allen to America. The family lives in Cornelius.

Allen Gunn