July 3 I Lost My Mother!

I know that those of you who really know me realize that I lost my mom a long time ago when she had her final heart attack when I was 23.  At the time I had a preschooler, a five-month-old and was newly pregnant again, with a child I lost two months later.

But my mom had battled heart disease since her first heart attack when I was a 17-year-old college freshman.  That’s when I really lost her because that heart attack was the culmination of a broken heart, when I was just twelve and my baby brother died.  Anyway, when I was 17, she became an invalid, and that destroyed whatever confidence she had as a parent, and her ability to do all the things grandmothers do, once her daughters started having their own babies.  All of that to say, I didn’t learn a lot about grandmothering from my mother.  She was never able to change a diaper, babysit or even go grocery shopping with me.

So, when my adult son called last night and asked us to come back and see him, he had a hip replacement last Tuesday and we had been down for three days, it rattled me.  It is not that I didn’t want to go see him.  It’s not that he was having a normal recovery, but he asked us to come down, and this time there was nothing in particular he wanted, other than to see us.

My frame of reference for grandmothering and mothering, for that matter, has largely been seeing and  doing what could be done.  Kind of works oriented, as I think about it.  It’s not that I didn’t and don’t love my family, but I never had parents to just keep company with.  As an adult, I never played games, or had coffee with or went shopping with my parents…or my mom or my in-laws.  So it kind of threw me to think he might just want to see us, to spend time with us. 

As I pondered all of this, it made me think about a lot of things – about faith producing works, yes, but about love for God producing faith, and that faith in loving God back, producing works. So my love for my son could produce faith in him and his words and somehow in all of that, enjoy him.  I fear I have always been so focused on the doing part that I missed too much of the pleasure of the loving part.

This is all fresh thinking, and maybe in a few days, it will sort itself out.  I think all of these years of working kind of narrowed my vision, and I focused too often on the next task – even if the task was done out of love.  What I missed was laughter – and I do believe God means for us to laugh. A lot!!