April 14 is unquestionably one of the most important days in history. It is the day Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre, the day the Titanic hit an iceberg in the Atlantic and the day Sheila Carroll Harper was born.

To those of you making your way to Wikipedia to find out who Sheila Harper is, don’t bother. She doesn’t have a page. Not yet, at least.

Sheila Harper is my mom, and today is, in fact, her birthday. For self-centered reasons that mostly have to do with my existence being biologically dependent on hers, today is as consequential to me as the movie “Titanic” was to Leonardo DiCaprio’s career.

My mom and I have always had a good relationship. I suspect a lot of this has to do with us getting through the strained part of our mother-son bond early on. I was not the most cooperative little tot and did not seem to find it particularly important to listen to my mom during my first years of life.

As a toddler, I once crawled into the bathroom and locked myself in, refusing to heed my mom’s pleas to open the door.
My uncle eventually had to saw a hole in the door to get me out and, after another attempt to hide from my family at my older brother’s preschool, my mom had to purchase a leash to make sure I didn’t run away in public.

Yes, I was a leash child.

Fortunately, things evened out, and I had a relatively normal adolescence. I was probably as close with my parents as any of my friends were, occasionally staying in to watch a movie or play a board game with them.

In hindsight, however, I can see how superficial much of our connection was. Most of what I valued about my parents was based on how it affected me.

I really liked them at Christmas-time or when I came home from tennis practice to find a warm dinner waiting for me. I didn’t like them as much if they wouldn’t let me drive somewhere I wanted to go. Nonetheless, the positives far outweighed the negatives, and when I left for Marquette, I did so with the grateful knowledge that I had parents who were there for me.

Two things changed once I got to college. One, I learned the significance of the maxim that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. As I no longer lived with the immediate benefits of free groceries, excellent meals and a car at my disposal, I was definitely able to appreciate the essentially thankless generosity my parents showed me during the first 18 years of my life.

In addition, because my interactions with my parents suddenly had less to do with what I wanted them to do for me, I started getting to know them more as people in their own right.

When I called home, my mom would tell me about her work as an occupational therapist and the games she was designing for her students, what she was reading for her book club or whose baby she was knitting a new hat for.
I too could talk with my parents as an adult and experience their genuine respect and support that had nothing to do with money. They were still remarkably charitable to me, taking me out to dinner or bringing me groceries when they visited Milwaukee, but these acts of kindness were no longer the mainstays of our relationship.

So, what does any of this have to do with a newspaper column? Not much. Newspapers usually talk about important events like presidents dying or ships sinking.

Most of the people who have the greatest impact on our lives would never make a headline, but even if a newspaper will never sing their praises, we should. Through all they have done for me and in more ways than I’ll probably ever know, my mom and dad have easily been the most influential people in my life.

So, happy birthday, Mom. Thank you, and I love you.