Not just in the things I’m proud of. In the restless parts, too. The drive. The creativity. The stubborn belief that there is always one more thing that can be accomplished before the day is finished.

Mom was an artist long before life gave her much room to be one. She grew up in Missouri’s Bootheel, became her high school valedictorian, and left the farm for St. Louis at eighteen. Her father had died and her older brother had joined the Army before she was fifteen, leaving her, the oldest daughter, carrying responsibilities most children today would have difficulty imagining—planting, plowing, caring for animals, helping hold together a farm while her younger sisters were still too small to shoulder much of the load.

Perhaps that is where she learned to keep going.

But somewhere underneath all that responsibility lived an artist waiting for her turn.

Years later, she built a large craft room onto her home. I think differently about that room now. It wasn’t simply a place filled with paints, brushes, fabric, dolls and supplies. It was a piece of herself finally being given permission to breathe. She painted, drew, created and painstakingly outfitted hundreds of dolls she treasured.

And somehow, without either of us realizing it at the time, she handed that creative hunger to me.

As a little boy, I was already drawing and painting. In first grade, while other children were making simple pictures, I remember painting waterfalls tumbling over rocks and bringing home ribbons from art shows. Drawing became painting, painting became sculpture, and eventually people began buying things I had created.

Mom saw something there.

When I was a sophomore in high school, she enrolled me in an associate design-degree curriculum. I spent two years there and graduated near the top of my class with a 3.95 GPA. Art became design, design became business, and years later I returned to college at thirty-five, eventually completing degrees that would lead me into advertising, marketing and web design—and ultimately into building my own company.

And now, perhaps inevitably, that same creative impulse has found another home in writing books.

But creativity wasn’t the only inheritance.

Mom was a single mother who worked relentlessly to keep us afloat. She would leave around 7:30 in the morning, return about 5:00, then often leave again from 7:00 until 11:00 for another job. Weekends could mean another full shift. Sunday was sometimes the only pause.

Because she wasn’t there to do everything for me, I learned to cook, wash clothes and take care of myself. And although I didn’t understand it then, I was also learning something else:

Keep going. Work harder. Don’t make excuses.

After meningitis nearly took my life at three and left me with lasting physical challenges and significant hearing loss, Mom knew some things would always be harder for me.

She simply refused to teach me that harder meant impossible.

She expected my best.

For much of my life, I considered that one of her greatest gifts.

I still do.

But age has taught me there was another side to the lesson.

Mom would sometimes tell me, “You can’t burn the candle at both ends.”

The irony is that I had learned how by watching her.

And I became very good at it.

There were years when accomplishment became almost indistinguishable from identity. Another project. Another degree. Another client. Another goal. Another hour squeezed from a day that had already given everything it had.

You can live that way.

You can even become successful that way.

But eventually you discover that some of the things sacrificed to achievement cannot simply be purchased back.

Relationships need time. Love needs presence. Children don’t remain children while we finish one more project. And the people we assume will always be there eventually aren’t.

That may be the part of Mom’s inheritance I understand differently today.

In 1979, she met Pops. They married and eventually moved near Destin, Florida, where they shared more than forty years together. She finally found some of the room life had denied her when she was younger—room to create, room to love, room simply to live.

Decades later, I met Melody.

And perhaps one of the gifts of growing older is realizing that we don’t have to reject what our parents gave us in order to improve upon it.

I still have Mom’s work ethic.

I still have her stubbornness.

I still have that almost uncontrollable need to create something where nothing existed yesterday.

But I am learning to put the candle down sometimes.

To sit longer.

To travel.

To laugh.

To love the people who are still at the table.

To recognize that a productive day and a meaningful day are not always the same thing.

Two years ago, when I first wrote these thoughts, Mom was still part of the story I was telling.

Today, she is part of the story I carry.

And maybe that is why I understand her differently now.

We spend the first half of our lives becoming ourselves, sometimes determined not to become our parents. Then one day we catch ourselves in a gesture, a habit, a sentence, a strength—or even a weakness—and realize they never really left us.

The inheritance isn’t becoming exactly who they were.

It is taking what they gave us, honoring what was beautiful, learning from what was costly, and carrying it forward a little more wisely.

Thanks, Mom.

I’m still creating.

I’m still learning.

And I’m finally trying not to burn quite so much of the candle.