My Mom is a Force

I can’t write about my mom.

Usually I turn to words to give life to my thoughts, feelings and ideas but when I try to write about my mom, words seem colorless, anemic, and insubstantial.

My mom is a force.

I am, at times, tempted to wonder if God loves me but then I think about my mom and that seems like proof enough that God is good and that He loves me well.

My mom is a survivor of a scanty childhood with Dickensian hardships, a vague ambivalence in the place of mother love, a father who passed through and a decade or more of big-bomb-duck-and-cover paranoia. She married right after high school, a dashing older marine with a passion for fire suppression and a charm that had a liquid gold dark side, but they had a baby, built a home, had another baby and made a life while the rest of the country tuned out, turned on and protested the very life they went right ahead and lived.

Mom watched the sixties on TV. She wept when JFK was shot and Bobby and Martin and the kids at Kent State. She watched lunar landings, Watergate hearings, reports from Vietnam and riots in Watts. She watched other women go to work, burn their bras and sing along with Helen Reddy but she just lived life strong, free and female without attending parades or consciousness raising sessions. Her consciousness was already a rock wall the height of a Redwood.

I attended public school but I was homeschooled in all that matters – God, country, politics, history, books, self-worth, courage, stamina, faithfulness and truth. I don’t remember mom’s cookies or lasagna recipes but I do remember her conversations, her civic involvement, her thinking, analyzing, challenging everyday discussions with people who made the mistake of thinking their small lives were the center of the universe instead of, well, the universe.

My mom is a university.

She is a political movement, an encyclopedia without the boring sections, an expose on small-minded, myopic, chauvinistic, uninformed, self-involved, “here’syoursign” non-thinkers. She is an epic mom sweeping generations with her power and influence.

When my mom got her groove on with God life clicked into place like the tumblers of the lock on a mighty vault and the wind that blew when that door flew open was like a blast of C4 with a nuclear chaser. There was a shudder that swept like an infectious contagion through the demons that claimed South County as their own and some just packed up and moved south without a fight which might provide an explanation for climate shift and global warming.

My mom is one woman under God.

Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

My mom is the mother-lode of motherlove. Her mothercup is so full it sloshes over the sides and splashes out onto those who were not born from her womb but are still embraced by her all-inclusive, messy, witty, unconditional, whatyoutalkin’boutWillis, comeoverhereandletmeslapyou send me your huddled masses living statue of motherlove. Total strangers sit at her table and rise up brothers and sisters full of cheesecake and new ideas.

My mom is the single most powerful earthly influence on who I was, who I came to be and who I am becoming.

My mom shapes future generations.

My mom celebrates me as though I hold the cure for poverty, disease and poor fashion sense in my tiny little brain.

My mom is D-Day heroic on any given day.

I can’t write about my mom.

The woman cannot be contained on the one-dimensional page. She is blockbuster, live-action, high def, multi-dimensional, coming to a theatre near you must-see-TV.

My mom is a global network wired to the highest power.

It is not possible to fully appreciate my mom with just a single Sunday in May.

That’s all right. My mom is eternal and her light will shine on as far as the soul can see.

Proverbs 31:29 “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”

I can never write about you, Mom. Just know that I love you. Happy Mother’s Day.