Belinda Hunt-Smith, 41, from Pontiac, Mich., is attending the prom on Friday, and she's not going as a chaperone. Back when Hunt-Smith was a high school student, she wasn't able to attend her prom because she couldn't afford to buy a dress or to get her hair done.
"It tore me up inside because I really wanted to go. I think I cried every night up until prom," Hunt-Smith told Click Detroit. She even told classmates that she didn't want to attend so they wouldn't know her situation, which included experiencing her mother dying from leukemia when Hunt-Smith was 11 years old and then having to move in with her grandmother to help raise her siblings.
"I didn't want people to know that I was in a bad situation," she explained. "I [told myself], 'If I ever have kids I'll make sure they can go.'"
Well, I'm quite sure Hunt-Smith didn't realize then that her own son would make her dream come true years later. Danotiss Smith is an 18-year-old senior at Kettering High School in Pontiac, and by all accounts he deserves an award for Son of the Year. The star athlete knew that his mother wasn't able to attend the prom, and he shocked her when she asked who he was taking.
"He explained it to me like, 'You're always there, you do everything for me. I want you to go," Hunt-Smith told the Huffington Post. "For him to want to share that moment with me … I'm at a loss for words."
Smith, who will attend college in Iowa in the fall, has made his mother the happiest woman on earth, and he's not one bit embarrassed to bring her to the prom.
"This is the best Mother's Day gift I ever could have wanted," Hunt-Smith said.