There is an old diploma hanging on my wall that I look at often these days. It is a Kansas State High School Equivalency Diploma awarded to my mother, Kathy Joanne Elliott, on Nov. 26, 1986. It has become one of my most treasured possessions.

What’s funny is that I hardly noticed it while she was alive.

I knew she had earned her GED. But there is a difference between looking at something and truly seeing it. I didn’t really see this diploma until we were cleaning out my mother’s apartment after she died.

Then I saw it. Like, really saw it. I looked at her name. Then the date.

Nov. 26, 1986. I was ten years old. And all five of us children were in foster care. That changed what I was looking at and made me sit down and think.

Suddenly this was not just a piece of paper saying my mother had passed a test. During one of the darkest periods of her life, while her five children were in the foster system, living somewhere else, she was fighting to become better.

I wish I had asked her about 1986. Where did she study? Did she wonder if she would ever get us back? Did anybody ever tell her they were proud of her?

I don’t know. And I cannot ask her now. Maybe that is one of the quieter pains of life. The questions seem to get better after the person who could answer them is gone.

What I do know is that while much of my mother’s life was falling apart, she was still trying to build something in the midst of the storm.

How often do we tend to believe that growth will only happen when circumstances finally cooperate? That we can only work on ourselves when life finally settles down.

If you have been around for any amount of time, you know that life rarely gives us ideal growing conditions. Trees do not get to choose the soil where they are planted. They cannot negotiate the weather. They simply have to respond to the conditions surrounding them.

Some carry evidence of their environment and storms for their whole life. But growth can still happen. Similarly, my mother was trying to grow in some pretty difficult soil.

Even after we came home from foster care, life was not easy. There was an abusive boyfriend, an absent father, little money, and years when my mother had no car and we walked where we needed to go.

Yet, still, she kept moving.

After earning her GED, she continued her education and eventually earned an associate degree in accounting.

She kept becoming. Not perfectly....and I think that distinction really matters.

Growth does not mean we suddenly get everything right. My mother made mistakes. So have I, and the older I get, the more I believe maturity requires us to hold two truths at once.

Our past matters, and we are still responsible for what we do with our future. Understanding our wounds can help us heal, but understanding cannot become an excuse for remaining the same.

That is what I see when I look at her diploma.

I see grit. But even more, I see grace.

God was not finished with her when her children were taken away. He was not finished with her when she made mistakes. He was not finished with her when relationships failed and fighting addiction. He was there through it all, comforting and softening her heart.

Which leads me to another detail I could not overlook.

The frame.

Her parents made the frame. Many of the wounds she carried into adulthood were deeply rooted in her childhood. Yet one of her greatest accomplishments sits inside something her parents made with their own hands years later.

Somehow, something connected to some of her deepest wounds, came to surround one of her proudest moments in her adult life.

Forgiveness does not require us to pretend darkness was light. Healing does not mean the wound never existed. Maybe forgiveness is reaching a place where what happened to you no longer gets to decide what grows inside of you.

Maybe that is why I look at the diploma so often now.

It reminds me that slipping backward does not mean the journey is over. You get back up. Put another foot down. Then another. You keep walking. My mother knew something about walking. For years, that is literally how she moved through life.

Yea, absolutely nothing about that diploma changed after she died.

But I did.

And maybe there is something hanging on the wall at your parents’ house that you have walked past a thousand times. Maybe there is an old photograph you have never asked about. Maybe there is a story you stopped listening to years ago.

Ask, because there will come a day when you cannot.

I can’t ask my mother those questions anymore. But somehow, she is still answering some of them through an old diploma hanging on my wall.

I look at it and see a wounded woman who kept trying. A mother who made mistakes and continued becoming. A daughter who carried pain but found room for forgiveness.

I see faith. I see grit. I see grace. And if I stare at her name long enough, eventually I see part of myself.

Maybe that is my greatest inheritance of all.

We receive far more from the people who came before us than what gets divided up after they die. Some things we inherit need to end with us. Other things need to continue growing through us.

She is gone now, yet somehow I keep finding her footprints. This diploma is one of them.

I’ve learned that we honor those we have lost best by allowing what they taught us to continue to grow and change the way that we live.

For me, there is a lot more growing to do. There’s another place to forgive and another step to take.

My mother kept walking through it all and I have to keep walking too.

‘Well Rooted’ is a new column to the Great Bend Tribune written by Jeremy Elliott. Elliott owns a lawncare business and lives in the Great Bend area.