“Two North” is a story about one Christmas when my mom was spending time on the psychiatric ward of our town’s hospital after trying to commit suicide to escape a physically-abusive husband. I was thirteen. It was a cataclysmic event in our lives but it brought us together into a two-person tribe like no other event ever has in my life.

My wife’s cousin, an editor (e.g. “Flags of Our Fathers”), has convinced me to use it as the launching pad for a book about life with my mom. I have yet to find the time to do this but that book is still inside me and waiting to get out. It’ll happen.

I offer this story to my friends here at Eclectablog on Christmas as a tribute to my mother, a woman who went from a pregnant sixteen-year old to an executive for the Chrysler Corporation in the short span of twenty years.

Much of who I am today is because of her and the lessons she taught me.

Read it after the jump.