Thank you

 I want to take this moment to talk about the inspiration behind this project and who inspired me to do it. Some people change the directions of your life in loud and obvious ways, and then there are people like my mom who do it quietly and steadily, like gravity, you don’t notice until you realize you’ve been held up by it your entire life. She works as a buyer and planner at Parker Hannifin. That alone almost feels symbolic to me now. Someone who helps plan the systems that keep aircraft moving safely through the sky will also be the person who helped me to even dream about aviation in the first place. 

But before she was any of that, she was something more powerful.

A single mother putting herself through college

And for that, she was a girl from a low-income family who didn’t have the chance to go to college at all. 

That’s where her story could’ve stopped, and to be honest, that’s where a lot of stories stop. But she didn’t let it stop there. She chose something harder. She chose to move forward. She chose to build a life that didn’t just carry her, but also carried me too. I don’t think I’ve ever properly said thank you for what that actually means. Not just for the fact that I got to go to college, not just for the opportunities I’ve been given, but for the invisible weight she lifted every single day so that I wouldn’t have to carry it later. She made sure I could choose anything, even things she never got the chance to choose herself. 

I think about that more than she knows. There were moments when things were hard, moments I probably didn’t fully understand at the time, where she still showed up, still found a way, and still made it work. Not perfectly, not easily, but always. And that kind of consistency doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside, but from the inside of it, it feels like someone quietly building you a runway while you’re still figuring out how to walk. 

This project about women in aviation means a lot to me, but it wouldn’t exist the same way without her because she is a kind of woman in this field, and every field is built on the ones who carry responsibilities that go unseen, who make sacrifices that don’t get applause, who build futures that they may never fully step into themselves. But she is not just a part of my story, she is the reason I get to have one that reaches towards the sky at all. So this is for my mom, Angelia.

not just for what she did, but for who she is and for every woman who has ever had to build a life out of limited pieces and still managed to turn it into something that lifts someone else higher. 

So I want to say thank you to my mom for everything I was given, for everything you gave up, and for everything you turned into possibility, and thank you to all the women out there who keep our world spinning, even if no one else sees it.