dual personalities

Tag: Mothers

January 19, 2024

As the sparks fly upwards

by chuckofish

Today is my mother’s birthday–she would have been 98! She died almost 36 years ago.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her and miss her. She lived one of those “hidden lives” George Eliot wrote about. I know she sometimes lamented that her life had not amounted to much. I tried to cheer her up by reminding her, as only a self-centered child can, that she had three handsome, healthy, smart children to be proud of. That didn’t really help.

I thought I knew my mother pretty well. But I’m not so sure I did. I spent a lot of time with her; we were together a lot. I think she listened to me a lot, and she hardly ever argued–only occasionally countering a really stupid statement made by me. Her generation was advised not to inflict their ideas on their children, to let them decide for themselves what was right. (That worked out well, didn’t it?) The times they were a-changin’ and it was scary for parents. Really scary. I know she worried plenty about her children, especially when we went off to college. She worried about my brother for a solid ten years.

My mother was cut off from her family and her New England roots once she and my father settled for good in Missouri. We visited them occasionally. Her parents visited us once. Her sisters each visited once. Back then the phone was only for emergencies. She never really made friends in her new hometown. This is not to say she didn’t try. But it was an unwelcoming community in which we dwelled. She only had us and we were not enough. Not to be overly dramatic, but isolation kills.

This was a hard lesson to learn, but I learned it. We humans need community. So find a church and start going every week. Make that your new year’s resolution. Make a new friend. Call an old friend. Stay in the game.

Well, that turned serious. Sorry. But I have been reading Job.

For affliction does not come from the dust,
    nor does trouble sprout from the ground,
but man is born to trouble
    as the sparks fly upward.

–Job 5:6-7
3 Comments
May 11, 2023

“Remember your mothers, especially those who spoke to you the word of God”*

by chuckofish

Well, Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend. There are lots of lists on Instagram and around the blogosphere recommending presents to give your Mom. They are almost always pretty banal–although have you seen this?

Zut alors, what will they think of next?

I know I am difficult to buy a present for. I have everything I need–“the sun and the rain and the apple seed”–and when I see a $10 chair I want, I buy it. Daughter #1 brings me flowers every Sunday, so I do not need more. The boy comes to hang out every Tuesday morning. Sometimes we go out to lunch. He does not need to take me out to lunch. Daughter #2 is in (almost) constant contact with me and we fit in hour-long phone chats as we can.

My cup already runneth over.

So the wee twins will be spending (the entire) day lavishing their own sweet mother with attention and that is as it should be. Grandmothers-in-law need to step aside. The OM and I are going over to daughter #1’s house for brunch after church. I will bring her flowers (if I remember)!

I will be thinking of my own mother who has been gone now 35 years.

I will never stop missing my mother. Sometimes I think of all the stupid things I said in her presence and how she hardly ever argued with me. When occasionally she did contradict me, I knew it was important, and I never forgot those times. It has taken me all these years to sort everything out and I think she would be in agreement with me mostly. And I know she would be proud of me and of my children. She would love them so much.

So by all means, don’t forget your mother this Sunday or any Sunday.

Here is Charles Spurgeon’s tribute to his godly mother.

“My mother said to me, one day, “Ah, Charles! I often prayed the Lord to make you a Christian, but I never asked that you might become a Baptist.” I could not resist the temptation to reply, “Ah, mother! the Lord has answered your prayer with His usual bounty, and given you exceeding abundantly above what you asked or thought.”

Here’s some good motherly advice from Garden & Gun. “Mom taught me how to use the pronouns “I” and “me” correctly. I try not to flaunt it.” —Jere B.

And here’s a good list of films featuring wonderful mothers. Personally, I think it might be time to watch How Green Was My Valley (1941) directed by John Ford, with Sara Allgood as the Welsh mother.

Have a good day!

P.S.

*Charles Spurgeon

3 Comments
May 9, 2022

“Read poems as prayers,” he said…

by chuckofish

“and for your penance, translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.”*

Although I think of my mother every day, Mother’s Day is an occasion to give a special thought to the woman who loved me fiercely and without ebb.

My mother taught me to like poetry. (I certainly did not learn to at school.) She liked to read poems out loud and she liked to write them.

She never really got around to teaching me to cook or sew or really anything very practical, but we watched a lot of movies together and listened to a lot of records and talked about a lot of books we read. We took long drives together and went out to lunch. We went shopping and went to art museums and pointed out the things we liked. Pretty much this is what I did with my own children while they were growing up and still do whenever we can.

We pass down the love of poetry and a predilection for historical fiction and biography as well as the old furniture and handmade dresses. We pass on the love.

Here’s a favorite poem by one of my faves, Jorge Luis Borges, which seems particularly resonant on Mother’s Day.

From a lineage of Protestant ministers

and South American soldiers

who fought, with their incalculable dust,

against the Spaniards and the desert’s lances,

I am and I am not. My true lineage

Is the voice, which I can still hear, of my father

celebrating Swinburne music,

and the great volumes I have leafed through,

leafed through and never read, which was enough.

I am whatever the philosophers told me.

Chance or destiny, those two names

for a secret thing we’ll never understand,

lavished me with homelands: Buenos Aires,

Nara, where I spent a single night,

Geneva, Iceland, the two Cordobas…

I am the hollow solitary dream

in which I lose or try to lose myself,

the bondage between two twilights,

the old mornings, the first

time I saw the sea or an ignorant moon,

without its Virgil and without its Galileo.

I am every instant of my lengthy time,

every night of scrupulous insomnia,

Every parting and every night before.

I am the faulty memory of an engraving

That’s still here in the room and that my eyes,

Now darkened, once saw clearly:

The Knight, Death, and the Devil.

I am that other one who saw the desert

and in its eternity goes on watching it.

I am a mirror, an echo. The epitaph.

–“Yesterdays” translated by Stephen Kessler

*Seamus Heaney, “Station Island XI”

4 Comments
May 10, 2019

“Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere, Not scorn’d in heav’n, though little notic’d here.”*

by chuckofish

Screen Shot 2019-05-09 at 11.16.22 AM.png

Let’s hear it for the weekend and for Mother’s Day!

Screen Shot 2019-05-09 at 11.28.05 AM.pngScreen Shot 2019-05-09 at 11.20.16 AM.pngScreen Shot 2019-05-09 at 11.31.43 AM.pngScreen Shot 2019-05-09 at 11.34.17 AM.pngScreen Shot 2019-05-09 at 11.36.58 AM.pngScreen Shot 2019-05-09 at 11.40.01 AM.png

We are celebrating Mother’s Day on Saturday night with the wee babes (and their wonderful mother). Daughter #1 is in St. Louis for work today so she will stay in town and join us.

Have a good weekend and remember your mothers!

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“Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called The Demon for compliment’s sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave mouth growling…”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

Paintings are (top to bottom) by James Whistler, Francis Coates Jones, Honore Daumier, Nguyen Thanh Binh, Mary Cassatt, Henry Moore, Norman Rockwell)

*William Cowper, “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture Out of Norfolk”

6 Comments
May 7, 2014

Oh, sweet and blessed country, The home of God’s elect! Oh, sweet and blessed country That eager hearts expect!*

by chuckofish

Well, I got a little weepy in the car yesterday morning on the way to work. I had just heard from a friend that another friend’s mother had died. The friend was at our reunion this weekend and her mother had died the day after she returned to Virginia. Listening to Steve Earle’s Pilgrim was just a little too much for me.

Harriet and I met in the three-year old class at Sunday School and went to school together starting at age four. She is my oldest friend.

class61

Sometimes I would go home with her after church because she was an only child and needed some company. So I have known her mother a long time. Her father was much older, a dignified, shadowy figure in the background, around whom we had to be quiet. But her mother was quite a gal.

Unlike other mothers of that period, she always wore pants–grey flannel pants with a blue oxford shirt. It was like a uniform. She wore a navy blue dress to church. She was from Texas and spoke with a distinctive accent. She was a small woman, but she knew how to shoot, and God help the person who broke into her home or threatened her child. She was tough–Barbara Stanwyck tough.

Furthermore, she was an M.D. at a time when there weren’t a whole lot of female doctors. She had worked in a M.A.S.H. unit in Korea**. She had seen it all.

After the war, she got married and had a child, and she retired from doctoring. She moved into a house in suburban flyover-ville and lived a presumably quiet life. But what do I really know? To me, she was a pillar of the Altar Guild.

All through high school I sat with her in church every Sunday, because my own mother skipped church and prepared her Sunday School lesson in her classroom. I logged many an hour with Harriet and her parents in the third row from the back, Epistle side.

This past weekend we were talking about people’s mothers and how you always knew the ones who didn’t really care about you and the ones who probably didn’t even like you at all. I knew Mrs. T liked me. She liked me a lot.

marys4

Here is a picture of Mary T (still wearing grey flannel pants) in 1985. She is pictured with her first grandchild, along with my daughter on my mother’s lap–all four named Mary.

* Jerusalem the Golden by Bernard of Cluny, Hymn #309 (Lutheran Worship Hymnal)
**I am not sure of my facts here, but it had to be Korea (not WWII) because of her age.

6 Comments
January 18, 2014

Ehu fugaces labuntur anni*

by chuckofish

My siblings and I grew up in our lovely Midwestern city with two transplanted, New England parents. My father didn’t seem to miss his homeland that much — he didn’t really talk about it — but our mother felt like an exile (and actually used that word from time to time). She missed her family, yes, but her longing went deeper than that.

Mother had the heart of an explorer; oh, how she missed the New England mountains, woods, and waters! Emerson could have been describing her when he wrote:

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

While the longing for home, ski slopes, hiking trails, and canoes remained unfulfilled, Mother was not one to give up and do nothing. So with children in tow she set about exploring, usually on Sundays after church and usually unaccompanied by Father. We struggled up Forest Park’s version of Angel Falls.

For a four or five year old the path seemed incredibly arduous, muddy, and steep. All the way up I wondered what we would find at the top. It turned out to be just a field, but it seemed to exist in another world  — certainly not one just a few blocks from my house.

We visited the Park in all seasons. We went sledding, ice-skating, and boating at least once — maybe only once because we children behaved badly. But some places, such as the Jewel Box, we visited repeatedly.

jewel-box-forest-park-st-louis-1I particularly enjoyed this survival of the World’s Fair, since I cold run around on the paths, hide, and jump out at people (I regret to say, not always my family members). The Art Museum was one of my favorite destinations and there I developed a fascination for mummies, endless corridors of empty furnished rooms, and beautiful staircases to nowhere.

like this one, but not this one

like this one, but not this one

Mysterious spaces full of treasures.

Sometimes we just got in the car and drove until we got lost. Once we found an abandoned quarry with a lake of pink mud, a slough of despond if ever there was.

like this, but not this

like this, but not this

The rocks we threw into the slurry disappeared without trace. That trip scared me and gave me nightmares.

Sometimes we got a bit further afield and went to a state park like Elephant Rocks

I think Father came on this trip

I think Father came on this trip

That one made an impression on me because I almost got stuck trying to squeeze through a narrow passage in the rocks. I was not a skinny kid.

I could go on and on — I haven’t even touched books, movies, and baseball —  but I must say that except for the occasional moments of terror (e.g. pink mud and narrow spaces), I loved these outings. Until recently I probably would have said that my childhood was pretty boring and that time lagged horribly during long, hot summers, but I now realize that we actually did quite a bit when I was little. My mother managed to make even the twentieth trip to the Historical Society or the Art Museum interesting. Even if I didn’t know it at the time, these outings helped me develop a keen imagination and various interests. Quite by accident, I learned plenty, too.

mcc-and-siblings2
And if there was sometimes an element of desperation in my mother’s efforts, well, she had reason. But I know she also enjoyed herself, too, because she loved to learn and be with her children.

What childhood outings do you remember best?

*Alas, the fleeting years slip by (Horace).

 

 

 

4 Comments
May 10, 2013

The citadel of the family*

by chuckofish

Mother’s Day approaches. This is a bittersweet holiday for me, since it has been 25 years since I had a mother with whom to celebrate.

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But the blogosphere has been a-buzz with “What has your mother taught you?” posts, and I think it is still a valuable exercise to consider this question. And, of course, I do love lists. So here are some of the things that my mother taught me:

Keep it simple.

Holidays call for parties. Parties are always best when there are favors.

When you act like a lady, people treat you like a lady.

Going out for lunch is the best.

Going for a drive can help you take your mind off your problems.

Talk to children like adults.

Children like routine and boundaries, but try to be spontaneous once in awhile.

Furniture should not “match” and “suites” of furniture are indeed tacky. If you have antiques, they will not all be from the same period. It is okay to mix it up a little!

Hugging is good.

Children owe their parents nothing. They did not ask to be born. (She was the opposite of a Jewish mother.) Of course, this attitude makes you realize you owe your parents everything.

She was a bit of a snob, but she hated the expression “white trash”. No person is trash.

You never really know a person until you’ve walked around in their shoes for awhile.

Be Kind. Be kind. Be kind.

She must have been disappointed by my mean-girl persona at times, but I think she understood that it was a jungle at my private school. I remember once I complained about the girl who sat in the assigned desk in front of me (in first grade no less), who would turn around and put her “fat arm” on my desk. My mother said, “My heart bleeds for her.” I was surprised. There was no sympathy for me who had to put up with this unappealing girl. Of course, I immediately felt ashamed of my intolerance and I still cringe at the memory. I never liked that girl though.

My mother was not perfect and she taught me a few things which I had to un-learn over the years as well. But on the whole, she was a truly wonderful mother and I miss her every day.

MCC and siblings

What did you learn from your mother?

Here’s a lovely last-minute gift idea list from La Dolce Vita blog. Good ideas, but, no, I do not want to go see Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby with Leo.

Happy Mother’s Day and read this quote–It kind of says it all:

*”She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

8 Comments