On a warm spring evening recently, I stood outside the entryway to the chapel on campus while one of my students said good-bye to me. When I first started in campus ministry, he was the one I was most worried about. He was withdrawn, overwhelmed, and barely spoke to me the first semester of my ministry back in Spring 2025. Now there he stood, thanking me for everything I had done to help him over the course of the last 1.5 years. He made a point to look directly into my eyes while he listed each moment that had profoundly touched him. He then said: “You have been like a second mother to me.”
This theme ran throughout my campus ministry in this final semester with the students before I returned to being a stay-at-home mom. All my closest students started calling me their spiritual mother. They had met some of my spiritual children who are priests or seminarians, and a couple of my spiritual daughters along the way. It turned out these students didn’t need a buddy; they needed a mother during one of the most difficult transitions in life—from adolescence to adulthood. …
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