Each time my kids enter a new stage of life, I marvel at the
way my mother managed the ups and downs of parenting when I was growing up. Somehow she was able to help each of her five children step
smoothly over milestones and stumbling blocks without losing her own sense of
balance.
No matter what was going on in her personal life, Mom was
always there to help each of us kids though our challenges. She had an uncanny way of knowing whether we
needed a helping hand or a boost from behind.
Yet, she was willing to stand back and let us go it alone when she saw
that we needed the strength that comes from working things out for ourselves.
In my early years, I was more than willing to grasp hold of her warm, responsive hand. Once in the
old downtown Ogden JC Penney’s store, I let go of Mama’s hand and grabbed onto her
coat. Somehow, gazing intently into a
display case, I must have let go and grabbed hold again with the other
hand. Moments later, I was terrified to
discover someone else’s mother’s sleeve clutched firmly in my fingertips.
Luckily, my own mom, still standing on the other side,
reached down and drew me close again.
That’s how she’s always been.
Standing by my side, allowing me to let go but always willing to let me
hang on again when I needed to.
As a teenager, I let go a lot.
“When I grow up,” I said, “I’m not going to do this and
that, or anything like you.” I wanted to
set my own hours, pick out my own clothes, and decide whether or not to
practice violin.
Because Mom was able to draw a fine, almost invisible, line
between the decisions she felt comfortable letting me make and the ones she
knew she had to “help” me make, I made it through high school thinking I had
done it on my own.
But when, as a freshman in college, immersed in psychology and sociology classes, I felt compelled to stand on my own two feet and tell both
my parents everything I knew that they didn’t, that got me into trouble. I’ll never forget how Mom took me aside to explain
in no-nonsense terms that “book learning” and wisdom were not the same thing. There
were a few things I needed to learn through experience, and experience was something
she had that I didn’t.
That was all she said.
It wasn’t until years later, when the pressures of being an adult seemed
almost overwhelming, that I began to understand how growing up during the Great
Depression, living through World War II as a teenager, and starting out as a
newlywed with a nest egg of less than $50, could have taught my mom more than I
had ever learned in history books.
It also took me a long time to realize that a mom keeps on
washing dishes, making beds, and doing laundry, not to mention mending clothes,
bandaging skinned knees, and drying tears, even as her own tears are drying on
the pillowcase.
Mama probably had six or seven major operations in the years
I lived at home. Shamefully, I don’t
know the exact number, because I was never really aware of her pain.
She’d go to the hospital, leaving each of us kids a sealed letter to
be opened and read “just in case” and come home pale but smiling—glad to get
back to the business of taking care of us and the house. Thank heavens our dad was more sensitive than
I was to the fact that there were times when Mom needed extra help.
I didn't figure out what “just in case” meant, until I
entered the hospital as an adult and looked mortality straight in the eye. Lying on a gurney with an acute kidney
infection, I knew at last what it meant to want desperately to be well for “the
sake of the kids”.
I knew also that I’d been wrong about a lot of things. At one time, I fervently believed that the
ultimate goal of each generation was to rise above the last. But now, having raised seven kids to various
stages of life, including an oldest daughter who has set her wedding date, I’ve
learned slowly, surely, and sometimes painfully, that success for me can be
measured in only one way—how close I come to being like my Mom.
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| Mom holding her first great-grandchild. How she loved babies! |
