For Mom

Believe it our not, we preachers run out of things to say. Last week our lectionary texts were again from the gospel of John and the first letter of John and were about love. But I had just preached about love for the previous 2 Sundays and so I was grateful to focus on Rachel's Day. This week it's the same problem but It's Mother's Day. What do I say about Mother's Day that has not been said before? That moms love us and we should love them? That's obvious. So I am going about it in a different way.

When my dad was in his final illness and weeks from death, he asked my brother and I what we were going to say about him at the funeral. So we each presented our eulogies to him so he could read them ahead of time. My dad was clear-minded almost up to the end. My mom is suffering dementia. That's part of the reason I am going to be gone for a few weeks. So I thought I would do the same for her while she can still, I hope, understand it.

My mom was a brilliant woman who, though she had gotten a scholarship to college, was advised by her mother that higher education was not the proper path for a woman. So she became a nurse instead. But she continued to read voraciously and used to go weekly to our local library, take out the maximum number of books they allowed her and then go to a slightly more distant library and do the same. And she read at a phenomenal rate of speed. And she would share what she had learned. So I was always hearing about ideas, research, history and the like. My mom had a great impact on my intellectual development.

Not only did she read to us, she encouraged me to read to my brother at bedtime as soon as I was able. I still have a great reverence for books. Unlike her, I doubt I will read all the ones I have.

There is another way in which my mother encouraged my intellectual progress. She never let a sloppy thought go unchallenged. She didn't tolerate excuses; what you did or didn't do needed logical reasons to back them up. “I don't want to” or “I didn't feel like it” would not fly. Sometimes in life you have to do what you'd rather not or refrain from foolish things you wish to indulge in. You had to have a good reason for not doing what you ought to do and you had to be able to explain it. It made me a very logical and articulate person, though throughout my life I have come to acknowledge that people more often do things not for logical but for psychological reasons.

My mom was responsible for my spiritual interests. Besides more traditional bedtime stories, she also read to us from the Bible, mostly the gospels. It was she who decided that, after years of us not going to church, we needed to find one to attend. And she found a Presbyterian one, whose minister had a PhD and addressed topics with intellectual rigor. His sermons were very learned and very long. Which is why I keep mine to about 15 minutes. In a way, you can thank my mom for that.

Mom also introduced me to my favorite writer, C.S. Lewis. She passed onto me The Screwtape Letters, Lewis' shrewd look at the psychology of temptation and I was hooked. I've read just about everything he wrote. She also got me the Complete Sherlock Holmes for what I think was my 12^th birthday. And when the James Bond movies came out she got all the original novels and short stories and lent them to me, paperclipping a note over passages that she deemed too racy, telling me to go to the next chapter. Which I did because at that age the girls in the books were the least interesting part of his adventures.

This passing on of interests was fairly one-sided, though. Mom was never very interested in fantasy, horror, science fiction or other things I was into. She did however take such things into account when making birthday cakes. When I was getting a Lionel train set for my birthday, she made a train of cakes: engine, coal car, boxcar, flat car and caboose, and put them on rails made of licorice. When I got my own clock radio, she made a cake that looked like it. She teased me by showing it to me before it was iced. I tried to guess what my present was by its shape and failed. When I received my tome of Sherlock Holmes, she made a cake shaped like an open book and spelled out “Happy Birthday, Chris” in the Dancing Men code from one of the stories!

Mom was not only a very intellectual person but a creative one as well. Besides her cakes, she experimented with meals and cuisines. We might have Japanese food for dinner, complete with all the proper cups, bowls, and utensils. My brother and I learned to eat with chopsticks as kids.

Mom kept picking up crafts and hobbies: needlepoint, soap carving, chip carving, jewelry making, painting, Z-scale model trains so small that you could set up a layout of tracks and a village in an attache case and take it with you. She would get very deeply into each of these crafts, getting the instructional books and all the tools and supplies, make a few things and then move on. It got to where we told Mom to stop working on new gifts for our birthdays and Christmas and finish some of the old ones!

As I said, my mom was a nurse and so I had no fear of doctors or medical procedures. But neither did my brother or I get much sympathy when our injuries failed to reach the level of threatening life or quality of life. Possibly because she was head nurse of the recovery room, and had seen much, much worse than our scrapes and bruises. I don't remember her ever kissing boo-boos and making them better, but we did get excellent first-aid.

Mom was just as clinical with her own affliction: hearing loss. She never felt sorry for herself, though she listened to her record collection less and less. She loved music and singing when we were young. She did realize her hardness of hearing isolated her socially. She could talk to people one on one and through lip-reading make sense of the muffled sounds of their voice. But in crowded venues, the general indistinct roar of the crowds made it impossible for her to understand much. My own loud voice and ability to enunciate clearly I attribute to talking to her, as well as my vocabulary. Certain words are hard for the lipreader to distinguish, so it helps to have a lot of synonyms at your disposal.

I can remember just 3 things she did to accommodate her growing deafness. First, she got hearing aids. She had my brother and I tested for hearing loss and thus his was caught early in his life. The joke in the family was “Chris isn't hard of hearing; he just doesn't listen.”

Second, as it became obvious that she would not be able to continue as a practicing nurse, she went to college and got a degree in library science. She took care of the medical library at Jewish Hospital, where she spent virtually her whole career, and later, was their tumor registrar, a key position for any hospital wanting to be accredited for treating cancer. So vital was she that, after years of asking for an assistant went unheeded, she announced her early retirement. She was persuaded to stay on condition that she get an apprentice who could one day succeed her.

Third, she got a helper animal. This happened after a forklift backed over her in a warehouse hardware store. The operator failed to look behind him and she failed to hear his machine. She broke her pelvis in 3 places. Eventually she got a yappy little Pomeranian, named Pretty Boy, to alert her to things around her.

Her disability did get her and the family onto the internet earlier than most people. While we could and did talk over the phone using the Telecommunication Device for the Deaf technology, with the internet we could email each other without the awkwardness of waiting for someone from Missouri Rehab retyping what we said. She bought us our first computer for that purpose.

My mother is largely responsible for who I am: a nurse, a reader, a lover of music, a person equally comfortable with science and theology, a creative person who is also very logical, a person who can bounce back from adversity and deal with it matter-of-factly. I am deeply grateful to her.

We all have mothers. They all have strengths that they have passed on to us and weaknesses as well. But a mother's job is perhaps the most difficult one in the world. We each start as a part of our mother's body. She has to expel that part, in great pain, and then nourish it and raise it and guard it and teach it. She has to take 100% responsibility for its welfare and then, slowly give that up so that her child can become an independent individual. No one gets that completely right. And yet the fact that the majority of human beings do manage to live relatively responsible lives and navigate this world without causing it or the people around them grievous harm is a tribute to the fact that most mothers get it mostly right.

I hope my reminiscences about my mother have sparked memories of your own mother. I hope you see in yourself the gifts of strengths and temperament and skills that she gave you. If she is still in this world, let her know your gratitude for what she has done for you. Forgive her for the ways in which she was not quite up to this impossible task. Show her love for all the love she has showered on you. If she is with God, thank him for giving her to you.

The Bible says we are all descended from one mother. Mitochondrial DNA shows that to be literally true. And yet Mother's Day is just 110 years old, less if we go by the year Woodrow Wilson made it an official US holiday. Odd that it took so long for us to honor the person whose body we once belonged to. And the woman who started Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, turned against it in less than a decade because of its commercialization. She would rather people expressed their love and gratitude to their mothers through heartfelt handwritten letters.

This is mine to my mom. I hope at this point she understands it or at least grasps the sentiment behind it. And I hope that your mom will feel the same about however you express your love. Because we just don't do it enough. And one day it will be too late.