First Posted: 5/5/2014
The number of children in the Back Mountain who do not have mothers surprises Lori Russell.
“We have served three children that do not have mothers; their mothers died,” she said. There are many more children with myriad family situations.
So this Mother’s Day, Russell and her daughter, Kerri Manning, owners/mangers at two Adventures in Learning Centers in Dallas, looked for a Mother’s Day greeting that would take into consideration different family situations confronting children this Mother’s Day. They found an un-attributable quote on the Internet that summed up so many of the children’s situations:
“Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers-to-be, the mothers that are, the fathers who are mothers and the mothers who are no longer with us.”
The two printed the greeting on the window of the nursery school on Lake Street in Dallas.
“The quote fit perfectly,” said Russell. “We like to do themed window decorations every month so this was great,” added Kerri.
But there was another part of the window painting that would catch the eye of a passerby – a yellow beehive that said “In loving memory of Mrs. Besecker.”
Russell also takes care of children in an after-school care program and, from her after-school children, she learned that a popular Dallas Elementary School teacher, 43-year-old Arlene Besecker, died on April 25 after fighting brain cancer for 14 years.
“After school, we (the children) all sit around the counter and they all chimed in about Mrs. Besecker. It broke my heart that she had died and left her own teenage children in school,” said Russell.
So Jack Stout, a student of Besecker’s last year, painted a beehive in honor of Mrs. Besecker on the window. Besecker had always called her students “Besecker Bees” and many of the mothers of today were her students and remembered her.
Stout said of his window painting, “I think she (Mrs. Besecker) would have liked it.”
“Besecker was a large part of the community and a fellow teacher,” said Russell, who feels the painted window honors the memory of mothers past and present.
