She turns sixty this week.
I have known her for just more than half of those years, and in the same way she has watched me grow from infant to toddler to teenager to adult with infants and toddlers of my own, so I have watched her grow.
I have watched those black-brown eyes she got from her half-Choctaw great-grandmother, the same ones she gave to me, soften with the forgiveness of years spent working on it. I have watched the mouth she gave my sister smile without the weight of worry more than I ever did as a kid. I have watched her skin wrinkle into beauty lines that speak of wisdom and bravery and joy and a fierce determination that pulled her through all the hell of her past so she stands, today, mostly victorious.
A couple of weeks ago, we pulled off a surprise birthday party for her, and she walked through a closed door into a party room crammed full of close friends and family who love her. She laughed about having no idea of these plans, because she thought everyone had forgotten she had a birthday coming up at all and had begun planning her own celebration, with a tinge of sadness that she had to plan her own. We went right along with her plans so she wouldn’t know our secret, and then we gathered a week early and shouted our surprise and laughed at her shock.
I don’t know if she knows it or not, but the surprise we yelled said much more than that one word.
How could someone forget a remarkable woman like you? it said.
I get to call her Mama.
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My first memory of her is bright yellow, with orange and pink and blue around the edges, like a brilliant sunrise. She is reading a book to us. She was always reading books to us, because this is what librarians do for their children. She had a deep love for words, and she wanted to make sure her children loved them, too.
It was in that same house, not long after my first memory, that I remember watching my dad disappear on his motorcycle, and I ran into the house and threw myself onto the bed I shared with my sister, sobbing in my four-year-old hysterical way because I didn’t know when I would see him again.
She knelt by my side for as long as it took, stroking my back while I cried. She didn’t try telling me it would be all right. She didn’t try telling me he would be back soon. She didn’t try telling me he was leaving for our good.
I would learn later it was because she didn’t know any of those answers herself. She just hoped. And prayed. And went on with her life, caring for the three of us on her own.
She is the strongest woman I know.
///
She knelt by my side for another crying, too.
It was the first time I’d had a boyfriend. We dated for a month, or maybe two, and I was in love with that tan and those blue eyes framed by thick black lashes and the way he threw a baseball from the mound. And then he decided to date someone his own age, since I was two years younger, and I was heartbroken, sobbing once more into a pillow on my daybed.
She didn’t knock, just came on through without a word and knelt beside me and stroked my back. She didn’t tell me there would be others or that I would probably be glad for this breakup someday or that I was only fifteen. She sat there, and after a long, long time, she told me stories from her own falling-in-love days, about the boy who had called into a radio station her junior year and dedicated a love song to her, and it was too much too soon; and about the brother of a friend she’d had a crush on since grade school and how he never liked her back; and about the others who didn’t seem quite right for her. And by the end of it, I knew I wasn’t the only girl who’d ever had my heart broken like this.
She left my room, and I sat there in the growing dark, thinking about how this woman so beautiful and amazing had handed her heart to a man, a husband, who had broken it in ways I couldn’t even imagine.
She is the greatest woman I know.
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I was four or five that morning we were headed to church. We had just stepped out the front door when my mom said, Get in the car, kids. Be quiet, but be quick. Or something like that.
My brother and sister and I did as we were told without asking any questions, probably for the first time ever. We locked the car doors behind us. There was danger in her voice.
We watched her disappear into the house and come back with a gardening hoe. She rattled the branch of one of the trees that stood like a canopy over our yard, and something fell to the ground, something striped and long and thick. It writhed on the ground.
She started hacking, in her Sunday dress, chopping like her life depended on it. She saved us from snakes we couldn’t see that morning.
She hunted other snakes, too.
The ulcers and sorrow and anger that chased my brother after my parents’ divorce—she hunted those snakes on her knees, praying ceaselessly for him. A boyfriend who asked me to marry him early on, one who held a look she knew too well—she hunted that snake with boundaries and limitations and refusals, knowing what would eventually happen: he would stray and I would leave for good (she was right). The money worries that followed us like an unwanted dog, because she never could quite make ends meet with three growing kids—she hunted that snake with a school librarian job on the weekdays and a candy-stocker job at the local store on the weekends.
There were some snakes she could not see, like the ones that waited for my sister in the dark closets of a friend’s house, and the ones that burrowed not-enough holes all through my own heart, and the ones that wrapped my brother tight and hard and closed him to the men around him who might have taught him how to be a man. But she tried with every single day of her life.
She is the bravest woman I know.
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In sixth grade I signed up for band. In seventh grade I added volleyball and basketball and track, because I didn’t know what I most wanted to do. My mom let me throw myself into all of them.
She worked all day and cleaned house in the afternoons and then sat an evening away in the stands, cheering and clapping and paying attention even on the nights I sat the bench.
In high school, there was marching band and state competitions and volleyball and track and softball and tennis, and I wonder how many of those she wanted to miss. But she never did. She watched me direct the band as a drum major my junior and senior year, and she watched me braid the hair of my teammates in the year I had to sit volleyball out because of a knee surgery, and she drove all the way to a town forty miles away on her only day off to watch me run the 300-meter hurdles, even though I purposely scratched the event because I was so terrified of the humiliation of tripping and falling.
She was there the day I made second chair in the state band, even though I wanted first. She was there the day I ran the 800-meter run for the first time, even though I gassed out by the end of the first lap, since I’d only ever run the 400, and I came in dead last. She was there the day I stood on a graduation stage in my silver robe, shaking through my valedictorian speech while all eyes were on me and the maroon hair I’d dyed the night before as some kind of statement I’ve forgotten now.
She let me be who I was, and she stuck around to watch the failures and the victories so she could love me through every one.
She is the kindest woman I know.
///
There was a night we walked in late at home from my brother’s fifth-grade basketball game, and the answering machine was blinking. My dad had planned to come to the game but never showed, so, thinking it was him, my mother pressed the button. An unfamiliar voice said her name. And then the voice said, I just thought you should know your husband’s girlfriend is three months pregnant.
We stood there, unmoving, unblinking. All the air had been sucked from the room, and not one of us could breathe anymore.
And then my mother said those words in a clear, strong voice: It’s just a prank call. It’s not true.
My mother could lie when it mattered.
And even though we wondered, deep down, if those words were truth or lie, we loved her more for the cover-up.
She didn’t say words like that often, only when she knew we needed them, like the time we waited on a call, all of us strung tight with the waiting and wondering and hoping. Of course he’ll call, she said, even though it took him three years. Your milk will come in, she said after I had my first baby, when I stumbled down the stairs teary-eyed and exhausted and too disappointed to speak, even though it never did. They’ll be out in no time, she said the day my twins were born and nurses whisked them off to neonatal intensive care and I cried and cried and cried, even though it took them twenty agonizing days.
She is the most loving woman I know.
///
She is a piece of my history I am proud to call my own. I have watched her blossom into a loving grandmother, doting on all these boys (It’s the same feeling I had when you kids were born, she said after the first one slid into the world). And now that I am a mother, I know the courage and perseverance and determination it takes to be a good one, and I am so thankful she carried me in her womb and carried me through my growing-up years and carries me still into my mothering ones.
This woman, who kept every one of my earliest stories in a cardboard box under her bed, is the best mother I have ever known. I am who I am because of who she is. She is a hero, a warrior with battle wounds and a bruised purple heart and a legacy of love that saved the lives of three people, and so many more. It is in her heroism that she has taught me all about how to be the greatest mother.
Great mothering does not live in being the greatest housekeeper or the greatest lunch-maker or the greatest provider or even the greatest teacher or discipliner.
Great mothering lives in being the biggest fan.
It means letting children be who they are instead of trying to change them to be who we want them to be. It means guiding them gently in the way they should go instead of beating them toward our way with words or hands. It means staying present in the failures and the victories and all the places in between.
It means being the person they most want to be, because we love and honor and cherish and teach and hold and accept.
This was my mother’s gift to me.
This was my mother’s gift to the world.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
