Thought for Contemplation: “No one’s life is ordinary. We’re all the heroes and heroines, with fate or flaws to bear.” Maeve Binchy
“Ordinary People”
the Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson
First Parish in Cohasset
Mother’s Day
May 13, 2012
Readings: Why God Made Moms, author unknown
Joy in Ordinary Time by Meg Barnhouse
I was a young mother. Twenty two years old when I brought my just born son home from the hospital and laid him, swaddled tight the way he liked it, in the crib.
I had planned so hard for him. Had waited a year to conceive and then set about my nesting. I made maternity clothes and baby clothes. I took the hand-me-down crib, stripped it and sanded it and painted it with loving care. Especially the wooden relief figures of Bambi and the forest creatures. They were so sweet.
I’d made new slip covers of beautiful autumnal colors for the loveseat in his bedroom, and painted green and white circus tent stripes on the ceiling, so he would have something interesting to see as he stared up all day from his stranded position in the crib.
I had dreamed and longed and planned for him; it seemed for as long as I could remember.
And then he was there. There! There in my house, in the crib I had painted, on the sheets with little pictures of Jack and Jill. Tiny. Having lost weight in the hospital, just barely 7 pounds. Tiny.
I looked at him from what seemed like a safe distance- midway between the crib and the door. And I trembled. Trembled. This little creature trusted me. The universe had entrusted me with his care, and he, naïve, innocent, unknowing, had trusted the universe and now trusted me. His life was in my hands. And I had not a clue of what I was doing.
It took me years to realize that none of us did. Not my friends, and shockingly, not my parents. They had been faced with the same outrageous demand as the one I had encountered:
“Make it up!”
“Nobody really knows what they are doing. Just make it up!”
I loved my son, with a love so deep it hurt. But it didn’t really help me to know what he needed from a parent. I had to make it up and wait thirty or forty years to hear from him the verdict.
Happily he is a forgiving child. And if the verdict is not completely “not guilty” it is at least forgiven. It is not so easy with all of my children. Neither is it so easy with all of our parents or for that matter, grandparents. Some mistakes are huge. And between them are the things we did right, or they did right…the right words spoken, the right silence allowed to hold us, the right acknowledgement, or dismissal of a mistake or relinquishing of an embarrassment. The right things…They are all there too.
How old were you when you realized that your parents did the best they could? Maybe it wasn’t good enough. But it was the best they had in them to give or to do.
How old were you when you realized that your parents were people?
I remember how old I was when I realized, or rather was confronted with the reality that my teacher was a person.
I was in the second grade. We were in the supermarket- my mother, my sisters and I, and there, in the produce section, squeezing the fruit and vegetables, was Mrs. Dowling. Mrs. Dowling, my teacher.
What was she doing there? What was she doing there! my little confused self screamed in my head. But I said it softly, I think.
“Mom, what is she doing here?” I am sure I whispered.
“She’s shopping, just like the rest of us. She’s buying her groceries.”
My mother said it as though it were simple. But it wasn’t simple. It was turning my whole world upside down.
My teacher went shopping. Bought groceries. My teacher ate, had a life and a home. I was astounded.
All this time I had thought…I had thought that she lived in the “Teacher’s Closet.”
You know- that closet that was in the front of our classroom- the one with the huge, wide oak door and the gold letters stenciled on it “Teacher’s Closet.”
What was a Teacher’s Closet for, if it wasn’t for storing the teacher when we weren’t there in the classroom?
You may have had a shock like that when you realized your teacher was a person, or when you realized that your mother was a person, that she had parents too, parents who had raised her, taught her things, made her angry, encouraged and embarrassed her. That she was scared of things and learned things, and was once very small.
The Apostle Paul said in his wise letter to the people of the church in Corinth
“When I was a child I spoke like a child; I thought like a child;’
I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult I put an end to childish ways. (I Cor. 13:11)
It isn’t always easy.
My mother once told me about her earliest memory. She was a baby standing in the crib, crying and crying and no one was coming to take her out. She was furious and frustrated. That part I could understand. Furious and frustrated. She still was that some of the time. But for the longest time it created the weirdest picture in my mind, my mother with her glasses and thick head of wavy brown hair standing in a crib angry and frustrated, crying to be picked up.
Eventually I got the mental picture of my mother to shrink and look more like a baby, but it was hard to get rid of those glasses!
She would laugh now it she were still here listening me to tell it. She could always step back and laugh.
Meg Barnhouse says:
Celebrate being alive, drawing breath, celebrate that you are achingly sad today and that it will pass. It is good to feel feelings.
Celebrate that there is a love so big and good that it hurt to lose it. That there was a time so sweet that you ache, remembering it.#
We’ve had all kinds of mothers, present, absent, kind and cruel- some of them all in the same person. And here we are: full grown. No matter how much we may have wanted more, somehow we got enough to live and grow and thrive.
Celebrate being alive, drawing breath, celebrate that you are achingly sad today and that it will pass.#
Through the confusion of that complex jumble of feelings, of hurt, and love and gratitude, I seek a celebration…a simple celebration that honors what has been good.
And so I close with this poem, by poet laureate Billy Collins:
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that¹s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift- not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even. #
It’s not about being even, or even being fair. It is about celebrating ordinary life and ordinary people. Ordinary people, who might happen to be your mother.
Amen.
Join us for the last concert of the season this Sunday! We are very excited to welcome E.S.P., Boston’s newest vocal jazz trio. Featuring original songs and compelling new arrangements of familiar and lesser-known jazz tunes, E.S.P. has captivated audiences at the Regatta Bar and other venues in the Boston area with their sensuous blend and savvy musicality. E.S.P. features the voices of Emily Browder, Sandi Hammond, and Patrice Williamson, accompanied by a jazz piano trio consisting of Mark Shilansky on piano, Keala Kaumeheiwa on bass, and David Jamrog on drums. You can hear sound clips on their website at www.esptrio.com.
