In “other” Words: A Mother’s Love

“As Chris­tians, we are called to con­vert our lone­li­ness into soli­tude. We are called to expe­ri­ence our alone­ness not as a wound but as a gift–as God’s gift–so that in our alone­ness we might dis­cover how deeply we are loved by God.” ~ Henri Nouwen ~  Our mother used to tell us, “I do not want to hear that you are bored. There are plenty of things to do. Find some­thing.” And then she would walk away, going about her own busi­ness, leav­ing us to fig­ure out some­thing to occupy our own time.She used to call her­self a “domes­tic engi­neer” which would trans­late today to how many blog­gers describe them­selves: SAHM. It took me a few blog vis­its to fig­ure out that meant “stay at home mom.“She was always at home. Every sin­gle day when we got home from school, she was there. Rain or shine. Notice I did not say that she picked us up from school. No, we rode our bikes or walked to school and we only got a ride one way or the other if it was really rain­ing. A few sprin­kles? “You won’t melt.”

We did not have cable tele­vi­sion when we were grow­ing up. Not that we were poor and couldn’t afford it … it didn’t yet exist! We had a tele­vi­sion antenna on the roof of our house which allowed us to watch three chan­nels. I remem­ber how excited I was the day we dis­cov­ered a fourth chan­nel … UHF. Woohoo! And then there was the day we finally, finally got a color tele­vi­sion. I was so entranced with the new “Won­der­ful World of Color” that I didn’t want to move away from it. But I did. Because our mother said, “Enough! Go play out­side.” So out we went.

We had air con­di­tion­ing but it was a unit in the wall that only cooled some of the rooms in the house. It really didn’t mat­ter because we were not at home dur­ing those long sum­mer days, any­way. We would leave on our bikes in the morn­ing and our mother did not know exactly where we were dur­ing the day, but she knew gen­er­ally because she knew all of our friends and she knew where the swim­ming pool was. That’s where we spent our after­noons, with strict instruc­tions to be home at 5:10 p.m. because that was when din­ner was served. If you missed the “first seat­ing,” you missed din­ner because there was no “sec­ond seat­ing.” Oh, and my mother never uttered these words: “What do you want for din­ner?” We ate what she cooked. Or waited for the next meal to see if it looked more enticing.

We also spent a lot of time at the library in the sum­mer, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the sum­mer read­ing pro­gram there. So we spent many hours by our­selves, work­ing our way through the list of books picked out by the librar­i­ans to keep bore­dom at bay and pre­serve moth­ers’ sanity.

Video games? I remem­ber when Pong by Atari was the new attrac­tion in the local pizza par­lor. It was in gray and white, and the white bar went from side to side at a snail’s pace. We were mes­mer­ized for a few min­utes, but then the attrac­tion wore off.

You might think my mother was cruel, but I think just the oppo­site. I think she was a woman who under­stood that we had to grow up and make our own way in the world and she wanted us to be pre­pared. She was always busy doing some­thing around the house and I mar­vel now at the things she accom­plished because, even though I try to fol­low her exam­ple, when it comes to home­mak­ing, I fall far short of the mark. To her way of think­ing, there was so much work to be done that bore­dom equated with laziness.

And some­how, as a result of my upbring­ing, I have always equated lone­li­ness with bore­dom and, hence, lazi­ness. I guess that the old say­ing about idle hands being the devil’s play­ground really per­me­ates my psyche.

My mother suc­ceeded in one aspect of her rear­ing me: I am never bored. I can always find some­thing to do that is inter­est­ing, chal­leng­ing and time-consuming. Because of that, I am gen­er­ally very happy to be alone with my thoughts and activ­i­ties, and I really can’t remem­ber the last time that I felt lonely. I say this not to brag or make myself sound bet­ter than some­one else, because I know that lone­li­ness is a per­va­sive, even crip­pling, emo­tion for many people.

Rather, I think that I don’t have a lone­li­ness “chip.” I think that because of the way I was raised, I don’t really know how to feel lonely. When I am by myself, as when I am with oth­ers, I am busy. I am always check­ing items off my men­tal to-do lists and think­ing about the task I am going to tackle when I fin­ish what I am work­ing on. I laugh at peo­ple who talk about “multi-tasking” because that has always, thanks to my mother’s approach to life, been the way I approach things. Any other way would result in wasted time and it is a pre­cious com­mod­ity. If I could just fig­ure out a way to avoid sleep­ing, I would be a very con­tented per­son because I could accom­plish more.

So in review­ing the quote, I can see how alone­ness is a gift. I see how the abil­ity to func­tion on my own with­out need­ing to turn to other peo­ple to com­plete me, enter­tain me, focus me is a gift my mother gave me. I inter­pret the quote to ref­er­ence “alone­ness” in the sense of being apart from other human beings. Because I am never alone. The Divine never leaves me, never aban­dons me. And so I guess that some­where along the line, in my alone­ness, I dis­cov­ered not only that my mother loved me by set­ting the exam­ple that she did, but that the Divine does, too.

Thanks, Mom.

Tech­no­rati Tags: In “Other” Words