JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (BP)–It was a revelation to me that one of the reasons my step-dad was attracted to my mother 26 years ago was because of the way she single-handedly, for the most part, raised four children.
Dad told me this when I was helping him write a lasting eulogy for my mother after her death last October. The information shocked me. I expected to hear about my mother’s beauty. I expected him to comment on her flowing ebony hair and dark Cuban eyes. I didn’t expect her child-rearing skills to be something anyone found attractive.
But I’m learning. It’s not that I hadn’t had serious periods of enlightenment when I recognized that her parenting was not as poor as I had thought throughout my first few years of motherhood — it’s that my acknowledgement was far too little and way too late.
I always thought there would be time. Wait until the kids graduate from high school, wait until my husband’s ministry is more stable, wait until we unpack the boxes from our last move, or wait until there’s more money in the bank. For me “waiting” had become a way of dealing with living thousands of miles away from my mother’s home in Prescott, Ariz.
Last October, all that waiting came to an end. What I feel is deep regret and remorse that I couldn’t, wouldn’t or just didn’t take time to explain to Mother how much I had grown to respect her for the circumstances she had overcome and for the hope and optimism she had about each of her children.
I didn’t tell her thank you for not giving up on her dream that we could be close. Though she was not the perfect parent and didn’t always know the right things to do, she did love me to the very end and appeared baffled by my apparent lack of understanding of her very real need for attention and affirmation.
I could name a dozen reasons for how it got to be this way for us, but mostly they do not stand a chance against the reality that I can never, ever make up for this. Yes, God forgives and He is merciful – His hand will bring healing. But my love for Him also brings knowledge that there are some things for which we should express honest, heartfelt remorse.
This Mother’s Day, like many to come, I will stare at cards celebrating Mother in every store I visit. I will be bombarded with e-mail messages that urge me to send flowers to my mother. I will forever long for these years, which were to have been my “glory” years of pampering Mother.
Again, I always thought there would be more time. I was thrilled to accept a job in Jacksonville, Fla. Mayport Naval Station here was one of my mother’s favorite places to visit with my Navy veteran step-father. She had just been to Jacksonville in May of last year – before stopping at our former residence in Atlanta.
But I never got to experience the joy of walking on the beach with Mother at Mayport, meeting any of the Tampa relatives she spoke lovingly of, or taking that long-neglected trip with her to New York where she grew up, or to California where she raised me.
One of the things I had looked forward to this summer was to work at the Southern Baptist Convention in Phoenix. I planned on showing Mother off – in the state where I spent my first three years of high school and where she and my step-dad owned a retirement home. I planned on attending her beloved North Phoenix Baptist Church and getting reacquainted with some old friends. It’s been the fist time since I began covering SBC annual meetings in 1986 that the convention will be in Phoenix.
I feel sad, cheated and repentant all at the same time when I contemplate that Mother will never hear from me how truly beautiful she was. She will never hear me tell her how much I knew she suffered at the hands of my cruel and disturbed father, how I now understand these things. She will never hear me laugh at the mistakes and failures I made with my own children.
My surgeon said recently to me that no one really knows how much you feel like an orphan until you lose a parent yourself. I would have to agree. I guess I thought Mother was invincible. I EXPECTED her to live past my immaturity and let me make up to her what we have missed by circumstance, by time and by neglect.
I fully expected to spend long hours on the phone and big bucks on airline tickets to spend time with Mom in this period of my life. Just in my early 40s myself, I yearned for a time when we could celebrate our womanhood together – plan for my daughter’s inevitable wedding, welcome her grandchildren into our fold and get past the past. I thought these were going to be the best years of our life together.
Just a year before her death, I flew to be with my mother during my step-dad’s surgery to remove some cancer cells. Our long talks focused around what they would do together in the future, where they would live and how she would be taken care of in the event of his death. She seemed scared of the future and incapable of planning for a life that did not include Dad. I didn’t understand it.
With her sudden death at 66 years of age, things became clear. There would be no life without Dad. There would be no tidy little bedroom for her in our home, or grandma’s coming to stay for an extended period of time. There would be no plans for “caring for your parents” in their old age. We never got that far. I will never have that chance.
For those of you who still have an opportunity, remember this Mother’s Day that God is good and God is merciful. If your mother is alive and you need to breach the divide, get to it. If your mother has passed on and you feel remorse or regret, live up to it and try to honor her memory. If you have a great relationship with your mom, keep up the good work and look for ways to inspire others. Don’t judge, don’t gloat, but instead help both mothers and their grown children seek God’s gracious plan for how to relate to each other.
And remember to put “poor parenting” in context. Like Dad did. He saw our family’s deep love for one another and for God. He saw our mother’s deep desire to have a better way of life for herself and for her children. He saw past the small stuff to how remarkable a woman Mother was. Thanks Dad for helping me to see my mother, June Ramona, for who she was, and thanks Mother for highlighting in your Bible Philippians 2:1-4: “…[B]ut in humility consider others are more important than yourselves. Every one should look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.”
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Joni B. Hannigan is managing editor of the Florida Baptist Witness www.FloridaBaptistWitness.com and a member of First Baptist Church, Jacksonville Beach, Fla. She and her husband John have two children, Belinda, 21, and John III, 20.
