With Words of Wisdom

May 2010

Mothering is multifaceted, but you knew that. You either are one or you have had one.

I asked a group of women what was the worst advice and the best advice their mother ever gave them. Think about that for a moment. What was the worst advice and the best advice your mother ever gave you? My only regret is that I didn’t think to ask them what is the best advice and worst advice that they gave to their own children. So think about that, too.

Sometimes the quality of the advice is glaringly obvious. For instance, one woman told me that in elementary school when she was proudly showing her mother an all-A report card, the mother admonished her: “Don’t be too smart. People won’t like you.” Can you believe that?

My mother, too, was very free with advice that was emphatic in nature. One rule for me for some reason was NEVER wear pink. It has taken me 60 years but I have found that I like pink, and I look real good in it. Mother also told me more than once to never learn how to do anything I didn’t want to keep doing. This has worked extremely well for me, but I would never tell my daughter the same thing.

Mother told me very emphatically to “STAY MARRIED!” She yelled this to my new husband and me as we were driving away with the U-Haul full of wedding presents to our new life. And truly, it has been great advice, and at times, very important to remember.

But another woman told me that her mother said to stay married, and she stayed far too long with an abusive jerk partially on the strength of that command. A third woman said her mother said about marriage, “If you get it right the first time, you are darn lucky.” Yes, but do you need to hear this from your mother?

This led someone else to say that her mother said “Don’t go into any relationship thinking you are going to change the other person. The only person you can change is yourself.” This holds true on most every level I can think of including Christian community. We ought to print it on the foreheads of brides and grooms, as well as the pastors who marry them. Have you ever seen a pastor come in and try to change a congregation without ever looking at herself and her own behavior? I have, up close and personal.

Some bad advice

Of course, when we got to the worst advice category, there were several alumni of the “clean plate” club whose mothers always told them to NEVER leave anything on their plate because there were starving children in Africa. Most of us are pretty chubby, and none of us have ever gone to Africa to eradicate poverty.

Some advice sounds horrible and isn’t. A woman who is wealthy said her mother told her that money is power. I thought to myself, hmmm, what kind of Christian value is that? On the face of it, teaching your child that money is power seems shallow and ruthless. However, the rest of the message, lived out in the lives of her parents, was that there are so many hurting people in the world who do not enjoy lives like her sheltered, comfortable life. And that with money, she had the power to change the world for the better, gift by gift. Whew! That is powerful. And I can tell you, she does change the world, gift by gift by gift.

My respondents divided along age lines for this next one. Those over 50 were told by their mothers that the teacher was always right. Those under 40 picked up somewhere— they couldn’t really pin it on their mothers—that teachers were human beings, too, and that sometimes it was appropriate for a parent to advocate for a child. Since my daughter is a teacher and I am way over 50, in our family the teacher is double-always right.

Jesus’ mom was human

In the tradition of the church, the mother of all mothers, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is a vision of faithfulness, purity, wisdom, and compassion. I have seen paintings and sculptures and fabric pieces inspired by her that have broken my heart open to the holy, and I imagine you have too. From age to age she comes to people, as John Lennon sung, whispering words of wisdom . . . “Let it Be.” Yet even the BVM didn’t get it all right always and, occasionally, she gave Jesus some bad advice.

Scripture tells us Mary not only pondered the miracle of her child but also tried to get in the way of his growth, his call, his future. She worried about him going off the deep end. She went after him on the road to abandon his vision and come home. Instead, he refused to live his life within the framework of her comfort level. This is a huge thing. Jesus had to leave his mother and her anxiety for him behind, and then, of course, we know that when he would not return to being her little boy, she accepted his adulthood and she followed him all the way to the foot of the cross.

Mary is, in a word, enigmatic. She is every mother. Good advice and bad. Shadow and light. Here is a woman who incarnated Mary for me.

A woman like Mary

I only saw her once. She didn’t seem to like her own personal children too much, but she touched me in a holy way.

I had been meaning to get by to see her for about six months. Since she was almost 100 years old, delay could be problematic. But I had done the little calculation I do in my head about the boundaries of appropriate pastoral care, which in my case turns out to be so much more restrictive and self-protective than the Good Samaritan’s portfolio. I bet the Good Samaritan never checked to see if somebody was in the parish directory.

So anyway. I went to see her because an 85-year-old mutual friend had asked me to—she said that she was an Episcopalian moved by her family into an elderly residential facility in our county. I took my time going to see her because she wasn’t a parishioner and she was advertised as a “difficult person.” Pastoral care calculus: supposedly Episcopalian . . . ornery.

It took me six months to get there.

This Mary was in the bed by the window. Asleep, I think. On second glance, maybe asleep. Maybe playing possum.

She opened one eye. Saw: stranger, clerical collar, woman— potentially an off-putting combination. I smiled and asked her if she is so-and-so and told her that I am from the local parish and that I had heard she was Episcopalian. She barked back—“and Catholic and Presbyterian—nothing wrong with my religion! Not a thing.”

Oooookkkkaaaayy. I stammered that “Oh I didn’t think there was anything wrong with your religion.” She glared. I wilted. I went into my one minute and outtahere mode. Then out of the blue, she said she worked for three federal judges, loved one of them like a son, raised him. I said, “really?”

And then she said, “It’s real different here. All these women. I have never worked around so many women.” I realized that she saw this nursing home gig as a job. And it is.

I tried to think of something to say back that was politically correct about being around all women but unfortunately, at that very moment, at work, we were in one of those tiresome, tiny church squabbles involving buckets of women of a certain age, including myself.

Her advice

At that point in the conversation I abandoned political correctness. I found that I had perked up. I said, “I work with a lot of women.” This Mary said, “Well, just ignore spats and they go away. Don’t give little prissy fusses any attention and they will starve.”

My erstwhile feminist heart quavered. What on earth am I doing putting down women with a 98-year-old woman? Well, it quavered briefly. And then I said, “Well, it is tiring. I get sucked into the petty stuff all the time.” She grimaced and said, “You must like it or you wouldn’t.”

Ouch. I changed the subject. Tell me about the judges. She does. Especially the young one that she raised. She told me that sometimes she just wanted to find a ladder and climb into her third-story office without having to chitchat her way through all the courthouse crowd. This was remarkable. I knew exactly what she was talking about; however, my office was on the ground floor, and all I would need to do is unlatch the window. This had real possibilities.

Thinking about God

She retired at 69 although they asked her to stay until 70. She told them “I can’t stand one more year of you and you can’t stand one more year of me.” I asked what she did when she quit work and she swept her hand around the walls of the room where there were delicate water-color pictures of birds in flight. She loved birds.

I told her about another resident of this nursing home—dead now—who could stand so still that the birds ate out of her hands and that anybody could if you stood still long enough. She snorted. No way.

She said her daughter lives in the next county and visits, though she is busy with grandchildren. She said “I don’t blame her; I was busy, too.” Another daughter only calls when she wants something. Mary could tell that it was that daughter by the way the phone rung. I said “You are kidding.” She said “Oh no, I am not.” And even with the closer daughter, Mary said when she comes into her room, she steels herself. “She thinks she’s going to fix me somehow.”

I asked her what she does all day. She said she thinks about God all the time. All the time. I asked “What do you think?” And she said, “Indescribable.” We sat.

After a while it was time. I asked her if she wanted someone to bring communion and she said “yes.” I asked her if I could come back. Yes. I left that Mary to her pondering. I never saw her again. God rest her soul. Mother to her children, and to a judge, and most beautifully and profoundly to herself: She birthed herself into eternity.

Happy Mother’s Day. If you are a mother, thank God for you. Give your kids lots of advice and then tell them that you might be wrong. And that you are just sure as can be that they have what it takes to figure that out.

If you are not a mother, thank God for you, too. Don’t be surprised if somebody somewhere, maybe even a federal judge, thinks you are.

The Rev. Martha Sterne is associate rector of Holy Innocents’ Episcopal Church, Atlanta, and author of Earthly Good: Seeing Heaven on Earth and Alive and Loose in the Ordinary: Stories of the Incarnation. She is the daughter of Anna and mother of Charles and Anna.