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Celebrating Good Enough Mothers May 8, 2005 The Reverend Roger Fritts Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland Each of us carries in our memories stories about our mothers, or stories about the person in our life who had the role of mother. This past week I gathered a selection of such stories. For example the book Angela’s Ashes is a tribute to Frank McCourt’s mother Angela. He writes about being in a play yard in Brooklyn in the 1930s with his younger brother Malachy. Frank is three and Malachy is two years old. The two boys are on a seesaw. Up, down, up, down. Malachy goes up. Frank gets off. Malachy goes down. The seesaw hits the ground. Malachy screams. His hand is on his mouth and there’s blood. Oh, God, Frank thinks, blood is bad. His mother will kill him. She runs across the playground, and says, What did you do? What did you do to the child? Frank does not know what to say. He does not know what he did. She pulls his ear. Go home. Go to bed. Bed? In the middle of the day? She pushes Frank toward the playground gate. Go. She picks up Malachy and walks off.
The apartment is empty and Frank wanders between the two rooms, the bedroom and the kitchen. His father is out looking for a job and his mother is at the hospital with Malachy. He wishes he had something to eat but there’s nothing in the icebox but cabbage leaves floating in melted ice. His father said never eat anything floating in water for the rot that might be in it. Frank falls asleep on his parents’ bed and when his mother shakes him it’s nearly dark. She says, Your little brother is going to sleep a while. He nearly bit his tongue off and ended up with lots of stitches. Our minds are filled with fragmented memories of such events in our childhood. Frank McCourt’s story reminds me of my own mother taking me to the emergency room and of the five stitches I received after my teeth went into my lower lip. I still have a small white scar. * * * * * * * * * Sometimes the memories that we have of mothers are guilty ones, memories of times when we as children exploited the intense love of our mothers. Tobias Wolff tells such a story in his book This Boy's Life: A Memoir. In 1955, 10 year old Toby and his divorced mother were driving across Colorado to Salt Lake City to start a new life. Their Nash Rambler boiled over just after they crossed the Continental Divide. While they were waiting for it to cool, they heard, from somewhere above them, the bawling of an air horn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past them into the next curve. They stared after it. “Oh, Toby,” his mother said, “he’s lost his brakes.” The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded. They drove on until they came to a place where the truck had gone off the road. Quite a few people were standing along the cliff. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. A stream of black smoke rose from the cab. Toby’s mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. They stood with the others at the cliff’s edge. Nobody spoke. His mother put her arm around his shoulder. For the rest of the day she kept looking over at him, touching him, brushing back his hair. Tobias Wolff wrote, “I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn’t help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle.” * * * * * * * * * Each of us have our own memories of our childhood. Sometimes an adult tried hard to care for us but did not know enough to provide the right kind of help. Eileen Simpson’s mother died when she was two months old and her father died when she was five. She was raised in New York City by her aunt who was a teacher and a school principal. In a memoir describing her childhood growing up with dyslexia (Reversals: A Personal Account of Victory over Dyslexia), she wrote about how her aunt tried to help her learn to read. She said: “there seemed to be nothing I could do to please auntie. With a feeling of impending doom I would begin. I might get halfway through the first sentence before auntie would say in a dry, controlled voice, ‘In the context the word cannot possibly be saw. The man saw going home. Does that make sense to you? It must be was.’” Nine year old Eileen would repeat “the man was going home.” In the next sentence or the one after, she would meet the word again, and hesitate. Had she said “was” before and had her aunt corrected it to say “saw” or vice versa? Eileen struggled as her dyslexia scabbled the order of the letters W-A-S. Her Aunt would say, “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize that word. I just told it to you. You’re not trying. How can you be so stupid? The word is ‘was.’ WAS WAS WAS.” So often we parents want to do the right thing, but we do not understand what is going on inside our children’s heads. * * * * * * * * * Another area where we parents are less than perfect is when we involve our children in our family fights. Russell Baker in his memoir Growing-Up describes the power struggle between his mother and her mother-in-law, who lived across the street from each other in a small town in Virginia. It was in the 1930s. His grandmother thought his mother kept the six-year-old Russell under too much discipline. One afternoon grandmother took him down into the cellar pantry to feed him on her homemade bread. Slicing a thick piece for each of them, she laid on a coat of butter, then said, “You want jelly on top of it?” “Yes ma’am, please,” said little Russell Baker. She took a jar from the shelf and removed the wax and had the knife poised to plunge in when they were caught. “Russell, what’re you doing down there?” His mother was silhouetted in the doorway. “Grandma’s fixing me a piece of jelly bread.” Mother spoke to her mother-in-law, “You know I don’t want him eating between meals.” Her voice was terrible with anger. So was Grandmother’s, “Are you going to tell me how to raise a boy?” “I’m telling you I don’t want him eating jelly bread between meals. He’s my child, and he’ll do as I tell him.” “Don’t you come in here telling me how to raise children. I raised a dozen children, and not one of them ever dared raise their voice to me like you do.” Little Russell cowered between them while the shouting rose, but they had forgotten him now as the accumulated bitterness came out. Finally his mother noticed he was still standing there with the buttered bread in his hand. “I want you to stay on the other side of the road where you belong,” she said to the boy. “He belongs over here just as much as he belongs over there,” his grandmother exclaimed. Russell’s mother started to leave but turned at the door and said, “You can eat the butter bread, but I don’t want any jelly put on it.” Grandmother jabbed her knife into the jar and smeared the bread with a thick coat of jelly, all the time glaring at the child’s mother. “Eat it,” she commanded. Russell waited until his mother marched out, and then he ate it while grandmother watched. He didn’t dare not to. * * * * * * * * * While Russell Baker learned about power struggles watching his mother and grandmother, Annie Dillard learned about humor as her mother raised her in the 1950s in Pittsburgh. (An American Childhood) “There’s a deer standing in the front hall,” she told Annie one quiet evening. “Really?” “No,” said her mother. “I just wanted to tell you something once without your saying, ‘I know.’” Annie remembers her mother having surgery on one of her eyes. On the operating table, just before she conked out, she said fearfully to the surgeon, “Will I be able to play the piano?” “Not on me,” the surgeon said. “You won’t pull that old joke one on me.” Of course, the surgeon was supposed to answer “Yes, my dear, brave woman, you will be able to play the piano after this operation,” to which Annie’s mother intended to reply, “Oh, good, I’ve always wanted to play the piano.” Annie wrote that her mother regarded the instructions on bureaucratic forms as a special opportunity. “Do you advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence?” After some thought she wrote, “Force.” She regarded children, even babies, as straight men. When her babies learned to crawl, Annie’s mother delighted in buying them gowns with drawstrings at the bottom, because she could step on the drawstring without the baby’s noticing, so they crawled and crawled and crawled and never got anywhere. * * * * * * * * * My final story comes from the writer Mark Salzman who in his book Lost in Place described how his mother embarrassed him when he was seven years old. It was the 1960s and Mark wrote to NASA asking for information about how he could become an astronaut. Three weeks later he received a large manila envelope from NASA stuffed with color photographs. Mark began his astronaut training immediately. One of the pamphlets showed an astronaut tucked inside a cramped mock capsule, and the text below explained that the astronauts had to get used to spending many long hours without being able to move. Mark decided to set a record for sitting still in a cramped space. He was sure this would get NASA’s attention. He found a cardboard box that he could barely fit into, drew buttons and gauges all over the inside of it, and outfitted it with a blanket, a thermometer, an alarm clock and a periscope made with two of his mother’s compact mirrors. He set up the space photos from NASA against the wall so he could look at them through the periscope and imagine himself on a real mission. Seven year old Mark began his program by sitting in the box for half an hour, and increased his time every day by adding ten minutes. After a week or so, when he felt his determination waning, he started pointing the box toward the TV so he could watch through the periscope to counteract the boredom. He did this for several weeks, building up to over three hours per session before the training came to an abrupt end one afternoon. That day the alarm clock indicated he had been inside for three hours and five minutes. Suddenly he heard a pop, and felt himself shift in position. Another pop, but this was a little longer in duration, and sounded more like something tearing. One of the taped seams of the cardboard box was opening. If it got any wider, the seven year old would lose all his air pressure in his space capsule. His body would inflated like a balloon, then freeze in the absolute vacuum of space. “Mayday, Mayday!” he shouted. “Mission Control, we have a problem.” “Mark, honey,” his mother said. “I’m teaching now.” Someone else said “Where did that voice come from, Mrs. Salzman?” “Oh, from that box over there near the TV. My son’s in it.” Young Mark turned the periscope around and saw, instead of the earth or moon or the limitless void, his mother, giving a piano lesson in the living room, and her student was sitting on the bench, staring in his direction. “He’s practicing to be an astronaut,” his mother explained in a stage whisper. “He puts those pictures of the stars in front of the box and looks at them through the little periscope. He’s been doing it for weeks.” She looked toward her son. “Mark, I think your box is starting to fall apart. Your rear end is sticking out.” Her student giggled. Mark’s butt had popped out of the spaceship, right in front of one of his mother’s teenage piano students. He pulled the toy periscope down, climbed out through the top and carefully avoided looking at either his mother or her student. His face was red. He went upstairs to his room, lay down on the bed and went into a black fog, which he descended into whenever he came out of an outstanding daydream and realized that he was still a little kid in Connecticut. * * * * * * * * * Perhaps one or more of these stories has stirred up memories of your own childhood.
• Like Frank McCourt, perhaps you recall your mother rushed to help when you or one of your brothers or sisters was injured.
• Like Tobias Wolff, perhaps you recall getting your mother to do you favors, when she was vulnerable.
• Like Eileen Simpson, perhaps you recall your mother struggling and failed to help you in school.
• Like Russell Baker, perhaps you recall watching your mother argue with other adults in the family.
• Like Annie Dillard, perhaps you recall your mother’s use of humor.
• Like Mark Salzman, perhaps you recall your mother embarrassing you in front of a stranger. None of these mothers was perfect, but each of them did their best. This is what the families I know are like. Children accidently cut themselves. Children exploit mothers when moms have weak moments. Mothers want their children to do well in school, but do not always know how to help them. Mothers have arguments in front of their children. Mothers make sarcastic jokes children do not always understand. Mothers embarrass us in front of others. Still most mons are good enough mothers. In spite of their imperfections, moms conveyed their love in a thousand ways.
• We remember a hug and a kiss when they put us to bed at night.
• We remember the meals each day so that we did not go hungry.
• We remember words of thanks when we bring home a small gift that we made at school for Mother’s Day.
• We remember a look of pride when we passed the eight grade, or high school, or college.
• We remember a smile when we return to visit. We remember these moments and we celebrate our imperfect mothers. We make phone calls, send cards, buy flowers, cook a special meal, go out for dinner, as a way of saying thanks. And we hope they are pleased with their imperfect children. |
Cedar Lane Unitarian
Universalist Church |
