A Mother's Day Letter

Four generations . . . 

{The letter I wrote to Mother last year (2016) for Mother’s Day}

Dear Mother,

It takes no special occasion to say “I love you” and we both know how much that’s true both ways.  But today I just want to say it this way.

I’m sorry for the reason you are here in Tennessee already, but every day I thank God you are here.  I love being able to see you and to talk and laugh and cry and gripe with you, to know how human we both are and yet to see – shot through it all – God’s love and grace.

Thank you for your wisdom – all the more precious because you don’t pretend it isn’t hard to live it, hard to win it.  For all the grief I gave you when younger, you were always the Orion leading me back to the Lord you serve and love.

Thank you for your example of loving – family, friends, church, community.  You have given and given and given – and you still are, though you find it harder to see just now.  The staff there [at the assisted living home] love you, the people who come to visit you are blessed by your smile and your humor and the love that shines through you.  I want to be like you when I grow up!

Thank you for your love for Daddy.  You two showed me every day what love is – the ability to care for another more than for yourself, to set aside self to serve another, all that the Scripture tells us love is.  Not holding on to little irritations, but leaving them behind, working together to make a life of oneness.  I know you miss that so terribly, and knowing you will be with Daddy again will make it easier for me when it’s time to let you go.

Thank you for your good humor, and showing me how to be honest about difficulties with those close to you without losing the bigger perspective of God’s love, in it all, even in the hardest of it.

I have friends who have walked life with me, who have loved me and prayed for me, and I am grateful for them all.  But, Mother, you are the one who will always hold a place that no one else could fill – your love has shown me how to love, and your love will always be the most important guide on earth to me.  All that is good in me has come through you and Daddy and the One you have always pointed me to.

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Thank you, I love you, and happy Mother’s Day!

Mother and Daddy's wedding photo.

Children and Children-in-law and Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren . . . (and missing a fair number of them, too!)                                          

Home Sweet Home

All I can say is, it's really, really good to be home.


Thanks to all for the prayers and encouragement.

Homesick Again

The sky is the heavy white-grey of snow-laden clouds, looking ready to drop their soft burden onto the wintered earth and cover its loss of green and gold. My heart aches at the sight, reminding me as it does of lovely Kansas winters sledding or ice-skating or drinking hot chocolate and reading by a wood fire. But, alas, all around me is only cold rain dripping onto brackish lawns and cement.

Home Again

In the summer, I mostly stay indoors because of severe allergies, and I sleep till long past dawn so that I can sleep at all. And so I miss seeing the moon except for the occasional night my son calls me in to see its beauty through his bedroom window.

Since the term has begun, it's been hazy skies when I've left in the early morning dark, and I've missed Phoebe lighting my way down the old ferry road. Instead, there is only the harsh, blinding glare of the neon lights by the side of the road, more distracting than helpful to barely woken eyes.

This morning, I thought it must be cloudy again as I drove to work and saw no sign of her. Then I got out of the car in the parking lot behind the library and looked straight up into a crystal clear sky -- to see a perfect quarter moon glowing in alabaster beauty. As I walked across campus toward my office, her brilliance heightened the garish look of the man-made lamps surrounding me and I kept looking up, risking a stumble on the concrete, feeling that I was being welcomed home.

Home Thoughts

My students are writing an essay which will include description of a place. Last night I was playing around with the mode a bit myself, and I came up with this, from my years at the University of Kansas. The true irony, to my mind, is that Wescoe is the humanities building . . . :( Six years in it was -- what shall I say? -- uninspiring.

Wescoe Hall squats ungracefully in the campus center. Its concrete walls could not speak beauty in any setting; the surrounding buildings of native limestone and red tile roofs only heighten its dullness. These older buildings lift the eye toward heaven with towers or turrets or steeply sloped gables. Wescoe sprawls across the land, low to the ground, flat-roofed, ashamed perhaps to usurp the heart of this centuries-old place with its unlovely modernity.

There are fun places I could go with this very rough sketch, but student essays call. Perhaps I'll revisit it.

(P.S. The Shenk review will appear in October's Touchstone, for those who are keeping track.)

Longing for Home Again

Smudgey grey clouds dusted the sky as we left the house in the still-dark morning, obscuring any evidence of Phoebe's light. As we left the store a half-hour later, the eastern sky shone a strange mix of ivories and ecrus, no colors at all, reminding me of a Kansas sky just before it turns its tornado-warning green.

I even miss the fear of tornadoes in a Kansas summer storm.

Longing for a Focus

{Note: The boy now has 4” on me; his voice on the phone is now mistaken for his dad’s instead of mine; and he has chosen the road to maturity instead of juvenile self-centeredness. So he no longer seems to be “the boy.” “Guy” is unacceptable because it denotes a physiological young man who determines to remain emotionally a boy. So while he may have a ways to go to fully arrive at it, he shall now be known as “the YM” – the young man.}

Quote from “Twenty Years After” – Betty Friedan’s preface to the 20th anniversary edition of her book The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963:

“Women [. . .] who combine work, marriage, and motherhood [. . .] have more control over their lives” than women who are “just housewives.”

In the margin of my copy appears the comment “surely this is a sick joke!”

I will grant you I did not choose to combine work, marriage, and motherhood, which undoubtedly affects my response to this assertion. However, I have not spent the past 20+ years in continual resentment over it, and I have tried my best to make the best of it, to make it “work.”

It doesn’t.

The assertion is false, and while some women may be completely happy to live this way, I refuse to believe they have more control over their lives than the woman who chooses one or the other.

Of course, Friedan frequently refers to the housekeepers and nannies and various other servants that the career women she knows all seem to hire . . . but even with a husband at home who takes care of most of the housework “drudgery” (laundry, cleaning, etc.), I do not have any sort of “control” over my life. (I can’t imagine how women manage who have to do all that after a day’s work outside the home – which is likely a lot more women than Friedan admits.)

This past summer, one of my goals was to let go – not be consumed by anxiety over the to-do list but try to live in His time and in His peace. I found at least a taste, and it was good.

I got far more done than I ever have, I think. Research on family concerns; the YM’s high school curriculum determined, books ordered, and first semester of daily assignments laid out; a good deal of reading both fun and purposeful; an essay drafted (whose death was of value – at least I know now what was wrong with the concept); a trip to visit parents; syllabi completed before classes began (a first!); and more. I even cooked a few real meals and made cookies with the YM.

I never felt rushed. I got up when I felt rested (and napped if I needed to – though after the first couple of weeks I rarely did), went to bed when I was ready, responded to my husband and the YM without constant annoyance at being interrupted – because there was nothing I was being interrupted from. I was living for others and not just for me and my timetable, created by the fact of my professional position and its ownership of my time and mind, by virtue of that monthly paycheck and all its attendant expectations.

Now I am trying to continue in that place. I am seeing some victories in leaving behind the constant anxiety that usually attends the semester, even as my days fill with more and more “things to be done.” It is better than usual, emotionally, much of the time. (Lord, help me find it this week!)

But control? More control over my life than I had all summer? I collapse into bed when I can no longer keep my burning eyes open, to be jerked awake a couple of hours earlier than my body clock accepts, so I can shower and dress and rush away from my family with quick hugs, only to spend my day immersed in what others require of me. No matter how much I enjoy teaching – and I do – I have no meaningful control over my time or my actions for those ten hours.

And when I come home, I have papers to grade and classes to prep, and when I choose to spend the evening with K and the YM, I must stay up and do the rest late at night – I am being paid for it to be done – only to drag myself up with the alarm and do it all again the next day. And when the weekend comes, all I want is to catch up on sleep, and yet there are the never-ending papers, the constant class prep, and my annoyance at interruptions from the ones I should be serving with delight.

Perhaps some women thrive so much on professional work that they are not exhausted by this routine. Perhaps the rewards of pay and prestige are so welcome to them that lack of time to restfully enjoy husband and children does not disturb them. Perhaps their children don’t need the emotional and time investment that mine seem to.

But even if they enjoy such a life, they do not have more control over their lives than I had this summer. And I do not understand why anyone would choose a frenetic pace determined by others over the freedom of “just a housewife.” For me, no amount of money, no amount of professional acclaim could ever be worth this constant exhaustion, this constant pull in too many directions, this lack of control over my life.

(And yes, I remember what it was like with young children, and I know that women at home are not autonomous and cannot do what they please; but they can be focused on serving family and not trying to serve both family and the mammon of professional expectations. It is a place of service and not a place of “personal fulfillment” which cannot be found when sought after. [One must lose one's life to find it.] And there is much freedom in not being pulled in so many different directions, but having one's life directed by one primary purpose, so that all choices are made within that one context. [Yes, I am teaching the controlling idea in my classes! One's life needs a CI, too.])

I would do anything acceptable to the God who gave His Son, acceptable to that Son who died for me, to be in that place again.

Mosaics of Longing

Spring 2002
Today from my front porch I can see the farthest range possible, so often obscured by the smoky haze that earned these mountains their name. My husband and youngest son are on the far side of those mountains, unloading the pickup and preparing to have dinner with our older daughter and her family. A part of my heart longs to be with them, playing with the grandbaby and sharing the joys of new motherhood with the grown child who has become one of my closest friends.

Yet the peacefulness of this moment has been a need for some weeks now, and my regret, while real, is not enough to spoil it. A warm wind blows my hair about my face. The ornamental pears in my neighbors’ yards, solid white three days ago, flaunt their spring green, while our dogwood appears afraid of another late frost, its blooms still closed and brown. A robin hopping beneath its boughs challenges it to faith.

The dense, bright clouds rimming the horizon look almost as solid and unchanging as the mountains and the sky they rest between, reminding me that while change is inevitable, it is not always obvious or immediate. I will look up in a minute or a year and see the difference.

This is where I live, and I love the landscape and, more importantly, the people whose lives have become enmeshed with mine. Yet it will never be home.

Oh, I know that no place here below the heavens will ever fully satisfy heart and soul. I am a pilgrim in the earth, made for something beyond this immediate reality, and I realize that my deepest longings have to do with eternity. But on this peaceful afternoon, looking out over the mountains, I am contemplating earthly longings and the vitality of place.

In the Southern literature I love, place seems almost a sentient being, a character, not mere setting. Raised in Kansas by Southern parents who longed for home and returned almost the day my father retired, their sense of place took root somewhere deep inside me, to blossom only after home was no longer the place I lived.

I love the Smokies. Majesty clothed in towering pines, laced with the delicate pink and white of innumerable dogwoods, punctuated with sudden bursts of wild color in every clearing and valley, they tell me much of nature, God, and man. But they are perhaps too rich for me, too lush. Raised in the gently rolling hills and austere plains of Kansas, I was made for a life more grounded in the astonishing vastness of the ordinary.

I learned the majesty of God in expansively variegated sunsets and endless starlit skies, in swaying fields of ripening wheat and golden sunflowers stretching to the horizon, in redbuds and poplars and dutch elms, in solitary oaks centered in acres of roughly woven pasture lands. These images have shaped in me a sense of limitless possibility and unexpected beauty in the midst of the most mundane and simple affairs of life. I do not experience heights and depths of emotion so much as immense rushes and minute intensities. I move easily from focus on a particular face to awe at the magnitude of friendship. A single daisy expands to hold the universe; the universe exquisitely contracts into the welcome-home hug of my son as he eagerly describes his day.

As beautiful as these mountains are, as much as I love them, still they enclose me, cut me off from the horizon. Perhaps my longing for home is simply my need to be surrounded by possibility again, to physically see the horizon expanded beyond eternity . . . to remember and embrace my own unique perspective without comparison to others that may seem richer and more desirable merely because they are not mine.

The day is closing, one more day spent in a bittersweet exile. The clouds have stretched and grown to mosaic the sky, the farthest range once more obscured by their haze. Yet I somehow find myself content to know that the distance contains home even as it lives within me, that home, however far away, is inevitably part of the ever-changing, ever-growing mosaic of my life.

Home Thoughts

Between Goessel and Newton, we would pass a field of sunflowers on our way to church. They never failed to startle. Lifted to the rising sun, their faces reflected its brilliance, acre after acre of bold yellow stretching to the horizon under an intense azure sky, glossy red-winged blackbirds singing praise from their fencepost pews.

I miss Kansas.