Piece on my mother for Mother's day

I do not know how my mother made it to the age of 92. Born of immigrant parents, premature and severely underweight during the flu epidemic of 1918, she lived through coal country strikes and oppression. When her father died when she was but 16, she was shuttled off to New York during the Depression. Only during some of the war years did she escape the haunting of poverty. She married my father, a seafarer, and moved back to Pennsylvania under the assumption that family could help her to the hospital if he would be on ship when she would deliver me. She suffered a miscarriage and was expecting my brother when our father was killed in a shipping accident and subsequent explosion. Ill-equipped to try to raise two children on her own, she made a foolish vow to not remarry if she could bring my brother to term.  She would live to undergo the trauma of his suicide at the same age our father died, at 32. Somehow, she survived, if never flourished, even as she labored with lifelong mental illness, most notably a crippling depressive core with an ever anxious exterior.

What seemed to be routine for most people was a never-ending mountain for her to try to traverse. Every Mother’s Day we would struggle to think up appropriate presents. It never mattered, as they would be inevitably be greeted with, “oh, this is such a disappointment.” At the same time, we knew that she loved us as best she was able.  She was devoted to our well-being fiercely.

Mothers labor under the pressing assumption that they should somehow be perfect. Indeed, my mother often referred to herself as the “world’s most perfect mother.”  As a Roman Catholic, she had a bit of trouble with the notion of papal infallibility, not on doctrinal grounds, but due to her surprise that someone else could share that trait with her. I recall Winnicott’s notion of the good enough parent; perfection is not required, but fidelity to the task.

Mothers transmit family legacy. It could be in traditional foods or a twist on a recipe. It can be in marking photographs or sharing stories.  I feel as if I knew my maternal grandmother, even    though she had died 7 years before I was born. I quote her often when people are hyperventilating about some detail for a wedding service: “a smart person won’t notice, and a dumb person will think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

 I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life. Abraham Lincoln

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Her personal religious search was for magical answers to prayer for her life to be better, especially to become rich. Yet, my mother encouraged religious faith in us. We went to church, even if she couldn’t face going. She got us what Catholics called bible history books to explore the Scriptures as children.

Toward the end of her life, stroke-related dementia robbed her of memory and mental function over time. In some ways, it eased the burdens of tragedy and anxieties. She died on Christmas, 2010.

I am convinced that no one raises a child alone.  God envelops homes. Sometimes we say or act in a way that can be ascribed only to inspiration or intervention. God is a guardian and guide for our souls, but also present as we are raised and as we carry on the sacred task of helping to sustain the life of our world in our own families.