The Voice in Your Head

“If it’s not yours, don’t touch it.”  “If you cannot say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”  “Take care of what you have.”  “Nobody can take your education away from you.” “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, and don’t sing songs that don’t honor Him.” “Keep busy, it doesn’t hurt as much if you just keep busy.”  “You can’t get your purity back.”  Well, the voice didn’t say that in those words, but it did mean that.  “Don’t take rides from strangers,” and “Don’t talk to strangers,” the voice said.  “You can get hurt in ways you cannot ever fix,” and I knew, sort of, what the voice was saying.

I used that last ones when I was on my way home from seeing Jim at his Army basic training.  I was in the Harrisburg bus station, and it was very late at night.  I ordered a cup of tea and found a table in the light where I could read, or at least look like I was reading, so no one would bother me.   But this guy did and he asked me where I was going and said he could drive me and get me there much sooner.  But the voice was there in my head and it came out like this: “My mother told me not to talk to strangers and not to ride with strangers, and I don’t know you, so no thank you.”

You see, for me the voice I still hear in my head is my mother’s even though I lost her forty-three years ago this week.  Yesterday I was cleaning off the shelf over my desk and pulled down a thick manila envelope filled with old pictures.  There were lots of me at all ages, and one where my husband described me as “slim of stature.”  I think I weighed seventy pounds in that one.  But there was also a great one of my mother and my sister Susan the day of her wedding, probably one of the last pictures of mother dressed up…a lady, my mother always looked like a lady, and she would have even without that great hat.

All of this makes me think about the voices in my children’s heads.  I wonder if they hear anything good.  I know how my mother’s voice marked me.  She valued education.  She valued acting like a “lady.”  She made much out of little, and it seemed like normal – you didn’t have to spend a lot of money to set a nice table and serve an attractive and appetizing meal. Some days I want to tell her that I really did learn from and value the voice she put in my head.  I want her to see that my children have turned out to be hard-working achieving adults, but I can hear her voice, if I tried to say that…as long as they know you love them, that’s what’s important.