Mom
The most important person in my life has
died.
Once there was a little boy. He was his mom's
first-born, and he was born breech—36 hours in delivery. He was a sickly
boy, with asthma, allergies, gastritis, and God knows what else. His momma (and
his dad) nursed him through the first five years of his life (he gained a pound
each of the last three years.) Mom and dad worked very hard to keep the family
grocery alive and well. They poured their heart and soul into their business and
their family. And through various ups and downs—WW II, spats with the
larger family, dad's drinking—their hard work paid off.
When Jimmy started school, he finally began to have his own success. He did so well, that a psychologist came to his 1st grade classroom and measured his IQ. It was 160. Lorene especially nurtured the boy and praised him for his academic and musical success. She had listened to Chopin all the time she was pregnant, and now here Jimmy was, a natural piano player. For all his smarts, Jim was afraid of the other boys and was most comfortable playing with the girls. His dad, a natural athlete, was disappointed, but Jim knew he was safe with his mom. In fact, Jim played cards with mom, grandmother and great grandmother. They sat out on the porch in the summertime and gossiped with the neighbors. Mom was a good friend, in fact. When Jim found his gang of wacky, prank-playing guys and gals in high school, mom played den mother to them all. She laughed at their pranks, and they in turn remembered her fondly in their own old age. As soft on Jim as mom was, once she locked him out of the house and made him go to school, where he tremblingly gave the speech for his induction into the National Honor Society in his junior year.
But there was a black secret. Jim had discovered he was gay. He told no one. On top of that, he developed gynecomastia. Jim showed his enlarged breasts, which he had been trying to hide, to his mom. She cried for him and made him a chest binder. But eventually, surgery was required. Somehow, Jim knew, however, that the one thing he could never tell mom was about his gay mental life.
Jim didn't know where he was supposed to fit in the world. He stayed in school almost ten years after he graduated from college, alternating between trips home and various academic experiments. When Jim was 26, he confronted his dad, Fernand, about his drinking, and broke off contact with home for a year. But eventually, the rift between Jim and his family healed. Still, in those days it was always mom that Jim talked to when he returned. They would stay up until the wee hours of the morning, talking about almost everything. Clearly there was a lasting love here.
Finally, when he was 31, Jim secured a position as a professor of education, and he completed a 33 year career at that same institution. Mom and dad didn't really understand exactly what Jim did, but they were reasonably proud of their learned son. Jim began to explore his sexuality about this time, and ended up developing a more or less openly gay life. One of his first tasks was to come out to mom and dad. But . . . first to mom, dad was too scary. The task was simple. Jim's parents had taught him to be honest, and he had to tell them who he thought he was. Well, eventually, Jim talked to his dad, too, and even had the courage to tell dad that he loved him. Little did Jim imagine at that time, that the person who would have the most problem with Jim's sexual orientation was his mother.
For many years, even decades, mom let it pass. But the older she got, the more concerned she got about Jim's, well, his salvation. You see, mom's dad died when she was seven. Just a few months after that, she was baptized in a fairly fundamentalist methodist church. She never attended church much in her life, but she listened faithfully to the pentecostal and evangelical preaching that crowded the airwaves of a small Ohio town. In fact, both mom and dad were extremely literal in their reading of the Bible, although they hammered away at just a few of the passages that It contained.
Jim thought by bringing up the subject of his sexual orientation when he was still in his thirties, that he would avoid difficulties later on. Alas, that was not to be. Jim went through his own spiritual evolution, from agnostic, to atheist, to born-again Christian, to an Eastern meditation-based spiritual practice, to episcopalian. He settled in the Episcopal Church, with his lifelong partner, Stephen.
Mom's family grew amazingly well. Jim's brother and sister both had children, and they in turn had children, eight great grandchildren so far. Through the decades, mom kept Jim up on all the family developments in their weekly or biweekly phone conversation. And Jim did what he could to keep mom up on his own family developments. That was always a struggle. Jim should have seen it coming more clearly. He just couldn't get mom to accept Stephen and his daughter, and later her family, on an even par with the families of his brother and sister. Mom always had reservations, although she didn't always make a big deal about it.
Still, Jim and mom did their best to cultivate the positive aspects of their relationship. They had going a decades-long Scrabble match. Mom was clearly the superior, with Jim winning maybe one in three games, and occasionally, Stephen would win a game. She loved being able to beat her Ph. D. son and his Ph. D. partner. Jim had always loved mom's cooking, and continued her cooking traditions. Often they had just prepared the same dish when he called.
Also, mom had an amazing memory. She could vividly relive a day in her life if she wanted to. As she grew older, as with so many, these memories hardened into certain specific stories. A lot of these stories were testimony, about how she and Fernand had fared on the Christian path. Some were about the dreadful times of the depression, and how hard she had to work. And many were about her grandmother, Eva Noe, and her German immigrant parents.
As the decades rolled on, I became more and more aware that I was listening to a goldmine of information. And, to my credit, I began to get serious about my own genealogy, and that of Lorene's. This eventually led to a 200+ page genealogy site that traces both my mother and father's history back into the 17th Century. Mom cooperated and helped me where she could. But eventually, her interest waned, and mine continued.
Dad died about 15 years before mom did. My dad and I had healed most of our relationship before that, but when he passed, his memory fully entered my heart and has never left. He came to me in a dream, and comforted me beyond any expectation I might ever have held. Other than the drinking of his earlier years, dad was a good and decent man, well remembered for his many, many charitable actions. And, thank God, the bad memories that I had of incidents related to his drinking became more and more replaced by this truer picture of his stature as a man.
I never really knew until the last few years of my mother's life just how much my homosexuality bothered her. It wasn't that she detested me for it. It was just that she simply wanted a normal son, one whom she could be with in Heaven. She devised a little code way of lecturing me. She would always testify how God sent her to Daniel 12 and Matthew 24, and tell me that the truth was in Daniel. And she would make vague references to the "abomination of desolation," the end times, and God coming to save this sinful world. I never believed any of this, and it truly was a case of us just talking past each other.
I worried so much about this. It bothered me. I tried and tried, first to educate her, and then just to say, look, I have my views and you have yours. I am a member of a Christian church. But nothing worked. I began to realize that my mom, who had loved me so much when I needed it most, could never accept my homosexuality as a normal thing, and that she had serious fears about my salvation.
Still, through all this, I loved her, and she loved me. We said so to each other. I still called her faithfully. When her health began to fail, I made special trips home to be with her, and to help my sister a bit with her care.
My grieving for mom came before she died. She had broken her hip and was 95. She was gamely pursuing rehabilitation, and yet growing weaker and more discouraged. Sitting 500 miles away from her, I found myself imagining me sitting beside her bed and singing old hymns to her "Shall we gather by the river?" "The Old Rugged Cross" and "What a friend we have in Jesus." I cried and cried and they were real tears of grief.
Then one Wednesday I called her in the nursing home, and I knew it was time to go home. I found a plane the next morning. I was there by afternoon. I could see that she had suffered about as much as a person could handle. Still we talked. I jokingly said to the nurse when I entered that I was the one who had given her the most trouble from start to finish. But she amazed me by telling the nurse that I was her "pride and joy" and that she just wanted to see me one more time before she left.
My brother, sister and I took turns staying with her that night, but she had still another day of life before her. One thing I learned from this. I had never been with anyone before when they had died. I wanted to be with mom, fervently. But death is such a personal process that I cannot talk about hers here. However, I WAS with her early the next morning when she passed.
I sincerely mourn for her loss, perhaps I more than anyone else, and I hope that is not a pretentious claim. And yet, it is I who have studied those old photographs of her and her family. It is I who see her as a young 30 year old mother, proud and hard-working, loving and forgiving, over-worked and beautiful. I am the expert on her life. I got to talk to her about that life for my whole life. I loved that life as I loved her. I truly internalized her misery at having to leave school in the 11th grade and go to work. I know how pained she was by her relationship to her mother and by dad's drinking. I know exactly the stories that are most important to her. I almost, but not quite, feel like I am mourning the death of a part of me.
But so far, after the songs and the tears, it has been a dry-eyed mourning. I put our differences behind me. I decided that it was ok that she couldn't accept my gay life and nature as normal. That's the way life is. We can't have everything, and that just happens to be one of the things I don't get to have. Instead, I got the right mom. My mom.
When Jimmy started school, he finally began to have his own success. He did so well, that a psychologist came to his 1st grade classroom and measured his IQ. It was 160. Lorene especially nurtured the boy and praised him for his academic and musical success. She had listened to Chopin all the time she was pregnant, and now here Jimmy was, a natural piano player. For all his smarts, Jim was afraid of the other boys and was most comfortable playing with the girls. His dad, a natural athlete, was disappointed, but Jim knew he was safe with his mom. In fact, Jim played cards with mom, grandmother and great grandmother. They sat out on the porch in the summertime and gossiped with the neighbors. Mom was a good friend, in fact. When Jim found his gang of wacky, prank-playing guys and gals in high school, mom played den mother to them all. She laughed at their pranks, and they in turn remembered her fondly in their own old age. As soft on Jim as mom was, once she locked him out of the house and made him go to school, where he tremblingly gave the speech for his induction into the National Honor Society in his junior year.
But there was a black secret. Jim had discovered he was gay. He told no one. On top of that, he developed gynecomastia. Jim showed his enlarged breasts, which he had been trying to hide, to his mom. She cried for him and made him a chest binder. But eventually, surgery was required. Somehow, Jim knew, however, that the one thing he could never tell mom was about his gay mental life.
Jim didn't know where he was supposed to fit in the world. He stayed in school almost ten years after he graduated from college, alternating between trips home and various academic experiments. When Jim was 26, he confronted his dad, Fernand, about his drinking, and broke off contact with home for a year. But eventually, the rift between Jim and his family healed. Still, in those days it was always mom that Jim talked to when he returned. They would stay up until the wee hours of the morning, talking about almost everything. Clearly there was a lasting love here.
Finally, when he was 31, Jim secured a position as a professor of education, and he completed a 33 year career at that same institution. Mom and dad didn't really understand exactly what Jim did, but they were reasonably proud of their learned son. Jim began to explore his sexuality about this time, and ended up developing a more or less openly gay life. One of his first tasks was to come out to mom and dad. But . . . first to mom, dad was too scary. The task was simple. Jim's parents had taught him to be honest, and he had to tell them who he thought he was. Well, eventually, Jim talked to his dad, too, and even had the courage to tell dad that he loved him. Little did Jim imagine at that time, that the person who would have the most problem with Jim's sexual orientation was his mother.
For many years, even decades, mom let it pass. But the older she got, the more concerned she got about Jim's, well, his salvation. You see, mom's dad died when she was seven. Just a few months after that, she was baptized in a fairly fundamentalist methodist church. She never attended church much in her life, but she listened faithfully to the pentecostal and evangelical preaching that crowded the airwaves of a small Ohio town. In fact, both mom and dad were extremely literal in their reading of the Bible, although they hammered away at just a few of the passages that It contained.
Jim thought by bringing up the subject of his sexual orientation when he was still in his thirties, that he would avoid difficulties later on. Alas, that was not to be. Jim went through his own spiritual evolution, from agnostic, to atheist, to born-again Christian, to an Eastern meditation-based spiritual practice, to episcopalian. He settled in the Episcopal Church, with his lifelong partner, Stephen.
Mom's family grew amazingly well. Jim's brother and sister both had children, and they in turn had children, eight great grandchildren so far. Through the decades, mom kept Jim up on all the family developments in their weekly or biweekly phone conversation. And Jim did what he could to keep mom up on his own family developments. That was always a struggle. Jim should have seen it coming more clearly. He just couldn't get mom to accept Stephen and his daughter, and later her family, on an even par with the families of his brother and sister. Mom always had reservations, although she didn't always make a big deal about it.
Still, Jim and mom did their best to cultivate the positive aspects of their relationship. They had going a decades-long Scrabble match. Mom was clearly the superior, with Jim winning maybe one in three games, and occasionally, Stephen would win a game. She loved being able to beat her Ph. D. son and his Ph. D. partner. Jim had always loved mom's cooking, and continued her cooking traditions. Often they had just prepared the same dish when he called.
Also, mom had an amazing memory. She could vividly relive a day in her life if she wanted to. As she grew older, as with so many, these memories hardened into certain specific stories. A lot of these stories were testimony, about how she and Fernand had fared on the Christian path. Some were about the dreadful times of the depression, and how hard she had to work. And many were about her grandmother, Eva Noe, and her German immigrant parents.
As the decades rolled on, I became more and more aware that I was listening to a goldmine of information. And, to my credit, I began to get serious about my own genealogy, and that of Lorene's. This eventually led to a 200+ page genealogy site that traces both my mother and father's history back into the 17th Century. Mom cooperated and helped me where she could. But eventually, her interest waned, and mine continued.
Dad died about 15 years before mom did. My dad and I had healed most of our relationship before that, but when he passed, his memory fully entered my heart and has never left. He came to me in a dream, and comforted me beyond any expectation I might ever have held. Other than the drinking of his earlier years, dad was a good and decent man, well remembered for his many, many charitable actions. And, thank God, the bad memories that I had of incidents related to his drinking became more and more replaced by this truer picture of his stature as a man.
I never really knew until the last few years of my mother's life just how much my homosexuality bothered her. It wasn't that she detested me for it. It was just that she simply wanted a normal son, one whom she could be with in Heaven. She devised a little code way of lecturing me. She would always testify how God sent her to Daniel 12 and Matthew 24, and tell me that the truth was in Daniel. And she would make vague references to the "abomination of desolation," the end times, and God coming to save this sinful world. I never believed any of this, and it truly was a case of us just talking past each other.
I worried so much about this. It bothered me. I tried and tried, first to educate her, and then just to say, look, I have my views and you have yours. I am a member of a Christian church. But nothing worked. I began to realize that my mom, who had loved me so much when I needed it most, could never accept my homosexuality as a normal thing, and that she had serious fears about my salvation.
Still, through all this, I loved her, and she loved me. We said so to each other. I still called her faithfully. When her health began to fail, I made special trips home to be with her, and to help my sister a bit with her care.
My grieving for mom came before she died. She had broken her hip and was 95. She was gamely pursuing rehabilitation, and yet growing weaker and more discouraged. Sitting 500 miles away from her, I found myself imagining me sitting beside her bed and singing old hymns to her "Shall we gather by the river?" "The Old Rugged Cross" and "What a friend we have in Jesus." I cried and cried and they were real tears of grief.
Then one Wednesday I called her in the nursing home, and I knew it was time to go home. I found a plane the next morning. I was there by afternoon. I could see that she had suffered about as much as a person could handle. Still we talked. I jokingly said to the nurse when I entered that I was the one who had given her the most trouble from start to finish. But she amazed me by telling the nurse that I was her "pride and joy" and that she just wanted to see me one more time before she left.
My brother, sister and I took turns staying with her that night, but she had still another day of life before her. One thing I learned from this. I had never been with anyone before when they had died. I wanted to be with mom, fervently. But death is such a personal process that I cannot talk about hers here. However, I WAS with her early the next morning when she passed.
I sincerely mourn for her loss, perhaps I more than anyone else, and I hope that is not a pretentious claim. And yet, it is I who have studied those old photographs of her and her family. It is I who see her as a young 30 year old mother, proud and hard-working, loving and forgiving, over-worked and beautiful. I am the expert on her life. I got to talk to her about that life for my whole life. I loved that life as I loved her. I truly internalized her misery at having to leave school in the 11th grade and go to work. I know how pained she was by her relationship to her mother and by dad's drinking. I know exactly the stories that are most important to her. I almost, but not quite, feel like I am mourning the death of a part of me.
But so far, after the songs and the tears, it has been a dry-eyed mourning. I put our differences behind me. I decided that it was ok that she couldn't accept my gay life and nature as normal. That's the way life is. We can't have everything, and that just happens to be one of the things I don't get to have. Instead, I got the right mom. My mom.
Posted: Mon - January 26, 2009 at 11:02 PM
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Published On: Mar 18, 2009 10:50 AM
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Published On: Mar 18, 2009 10:50 AM