Shelter of the Mother

“There is an old Irish saying: “It is in the shelter of each other that people live.” It is literally in the shelter of the Mother that we all start out life.

I remember staring at each newborn, amazed by her singular presence, wondering how he was put together so intricately, where she’d come from, and how it came to be that I was on earth to steward—for awhile—his or her sacred being. That surrender, that sacrifice is not an easy or predictable road. It is filled with trial and error, frustration, occasional frights and loss, a hefty dose of dumb luck, and daily awakenings and surprises. My husband and I were reminded of our rookie status by the nurse in the hospital in Berkeley, California where I’d given birth to my first-born, Elana. As we were leaving the hospital, the nurse whispered to our two-day old infant: “Elana, be good to your parents. They don’t have a clue what they’re doing.”

When they learn to use words—brace yourself—those utterly original comments made me think they were little reincarnated beings from other galaxies. A few vignettes give a taste of the salt and pepper of raising young ones. I’ll never forget the time when Jesse, our second child, was two years old and got the hiccoughs and they wouldn’t go away.  Gary said to Jesse, “Sometimes you can get rid of hiccoughs if you hold your breath.” So Jesse, in his literal way, blew his breath into his hands and held it!  When I was eight months pregnant with Thomas, my youngest, I was washing Elana’s feet before bed one night. She was six, and out of the blue she asked, “Why is that baby in you?”  I answered obliquely, not quite prepared to be honest, and said, “Well, he’ll be coming out soon and then you’ll have another brother to love.”  “No,” Elana insisted impatiently, daring me. “I don’t want to know that he’s coming out. I want to know how he got in there!” 

One evening Jesse and I were on the sofa reading a book; he narrowly missed kicking my pregnant belly, so I took his shoes off. Later in the week, I told Jesse that I just felt the baby kick me from inside.  Jesse exclaimed, “That’s ok, Mom, he doesn’t have any shoes on.”  Once Thomas was sucking a jaw breaker candy his brother had given him called a dinosaur egg. Thomas had been keeping it in his mouth for a long time. I started to worry he might choke on it, and I asked him about it.  He shot back with expectancy in his eyes, “I can’t chew it. I’m waiting for it to hatch!”

In 1993, my middle son, Jesse, and I were walking side by side to Grant Park near our home in Northeast Portland. I was a full-time parent for a few years, and he was in second grade, with a marked flash of honesty.  “Mom,” he said, gripping my hand, “you were a really good student in college weren’t you?”  I answered yes, and then expected maybe a little compliment.  Instead Jesse said, “Why didn’t you grow up and do something important with your life? You know being a mom won’t make you rich or famous!” Wow! This hit me hard. It shouldn’t have, but it made me feel unworthy. And I thought about it for weeks. In fact, Jesse had named a dissatisfaction, an angst I had been carrying for several months. I wasn’t, after all, earning a paycheck or building a career, and I often found myself questioning my value.

Gary was working 12 hour days away from home as a busy professional, and other people all around me seemed to be doing so many more important things with their lives than changing diapers, cleaning up chaos, calming melt-downs and refereeing sibling squabbles. Little kids are wired for self-centeredness, as they should be. They aren’t there to buck you up as a struggling parent trying to answer your own self-identity or personal destiny questions… 

They grow to become complex and fascinating people. Hellos are supplanted by good-byes as each child unintentionally walks away with your heart. Their independence is a sign of good parenting, but it is a parent’s loss. It is another surrender for parents. This surrendering is to the world, which will take them from you. And the world can be so hard. This is where a mother must do a tightrope walk balancing faith with powerlessness. Her children’s inexperienced adolescent and young adult choices can and often do have unintended consequences.  Every mother remembers a time when the fabric of unintended consequences is tugged or torn—mothers who witness their children hurt emotionally or physically, who witness burdens placed upon their children due to immature decisions, mothers who experience the terrible loss of a child to war, drug overdose, disease or fatal accident…

I’ll never forget when my youngest son Thomas was struck by a car on his bike at age 10 and lay on the street, in shock, with broken bones and lights of emergency vehicles flashing all around him. Or when my son Jesse at age seven was rushed to the hospital after falling and getting a deep gash right between the eyes. Or when my husband and I answered a call at one in the morning from a doctor in a distant city warning us that our college-age daughter might not pull through a medical emergency. Those were the times my body was no longer my own. Instead, my body was inhabited by the pain I carried for my children. Those were the times that required brute faith. All humans carry an ideal of motherhood inside our hearts.

Not all of us are mothers or parents, but we are all sons and daughters of mothers. Some of us have lost our mothers. Some of our mothers still care for us, and for some, we are now caring for them in their later years. But as long as they are alive, mothers are the owners, the repositories and living archives of our early personal histories, histories that pre-date even our own infant and childhood memories.  Sometimes the boundary between my mother and me felt like a permeable membrane, with a force flowing both ways. My caring for my mom and her caring for me sometimes got mixed up over the years in a complex web of who was caring for whom, and who was protecting the other from hurt or disappointment. But I’ve come to recognize that the way my mom and I carried each other internally had a lot to do with a deep sense of shared gender—our womanhood.

As a daughter growing up, I was curious and connected, and so I watched my mom carefully. She taught me through her own personal sacrifices and vibrant spirit so much about loving a family.  During my college years, we had important talks about the women’s movement and each of our identity struggles as women—mothers and daughters. Into my adulthood, I began to realize our lives had a lovely parallelism. We were both daughters of talented mothers. We were both wives of strong, ethical men and mothers of three children—two sons and one daughter. I really believe it’s because of her that I will always be grateful I was born into a woman’s body with a woman’s soul.

When I was 27 and she was 57, we wrote and published a book together, Hostage To Heaven, about my captivity in an authoritarian cult during the 1970’s and my rescue through my parents’ efforts. That mutual writing project brought much reconciliation and discovery. But especially in the last five years of her life, she helped me appreciate how deep is the mother-daughter connection. She is gone now and her passing was very hard. She was so attached to life, to people, to this earth—and I to her… 

I was my mother’s only daughter. The story of her last week of life reverberates through me. My older brother Doug and I went to visit my mom on her last Sunday. I visited her every Sunday, but this one was different. Over the last five years she had become disabled and unable to speak clearly due to two serious strokes.  I needed to explain to Mom that hospice care would start the next day. I knew I must tell her she was dying. Some people sense their life is coming to an end, but my mother did not. She felt durable. When I told her that she wouldn’t live long, she looked startled. I explained that she’d suffered a third major stroke and her swallowing reflex was completely disabled. She would no longer eat, drink or swallow.

For years, she’d been clear that she didn’t want a feeding tube to prolong her life. Without nourishment, her body would close down in a few days. I said words I believe and hoped would console her… I remember I told her she was beautiful and she was created for eternity. Doug and I stayed with her several hours remembering stories of our growing up. My mom just listened. We laughed, retelling quirky stories that constituted our family lore . . . like when Mom strapped Dad in his sleeping bag on top of our 1958 Ford station wagon to avoid bears on the ground while camping in Yosemite Valley. Or when Mom turned to me the night of the 120-mile-an-hour gusts during the Columbus Day storm—after we’d just moved to a bedroom community of Portland—and asked if it was always this windy in the suburbs. Or when Dad yelled at one of his adolescent kids, and we’d remind him that he was a pacifist!

Stories are the yeast of every family. With each story I gazed upon my mom, and thought about the length and depth, the complexity, generosity and rising of her life. A life is such a large thing. Hers was 88 years large. From Sunday until Thursday, our family members—my two brothers, my sister-in-law, my husband and my mom’s grandchildren—took turns sitting beside her. What took shape was a loving and patient vigil. We sat together with her, and we sat individually with her. We hummed songs she’d taught us long ago. Over and over we said thank you, I love you, and good-bye.  As the week progressed, I sensed a dissolving of boundaries between this moment and some incomprehensible future. Day by day her body diminished. Her head seemed so little, like a baby’s head, easily cupped in my palm. Her spirit began the process of outgrowing her skin. A friend calls it the dilation of the spirit.

She entered into that vulnerable space, that emptying where there was no volition on her part except to yield, where she could no longer protect herself mentally or physically from the inevitable cessation of her body’s function. Through the crucible of grace, her extreme vulnerability met us, and broke our hearts. By Wednesday, my mom entered a cocoon-like state. Her heart and lungs labored persistently with the force of life. We were witnessing the mystery of dying—how the vast passion of a discrete and marvelous human being yields to something as incomprehensible as eternity. How do we understand this mystery? It is no more knowable than the origin of the Cosmos or the Imagination that thought up an owl, an orchid or a newborn. We just believe. All during the vigil, my brothers Doug, Jeff and I, my husband Gary and my sister-in-law Susanne felt an intense responsibility to stay with my mom, to accompany her to her last breath. We all thought she needed that from us. And in spite of our exhaustion, we were determined to stay with her.

Thursday night after my mom’s life-long friends came and departed, our immediate family entered into a silent worship around her bed. We watched her chest rise and fall. We bowed in prayer. I longed for God to gather her in, to draw her into the fullness of love. During this deep silence, I experienced a peacefulness and hopefulness take over. I sensed that I could release her, that she didn’t need me to deliver her to her crossing over. It seemed that my mom was already occupying that space where the divine breaks into life. I knew she was going home. And with that sense, I experienced the release of a great weight and responsibility. This was the moment she was entrusted to God.

Our hospice nurse advised us that many people need to make their final departure in solitude. Always the people-pleaser, my mom may have been holding on for us. So after five days of vigil at her bedside, our family left her and gathered for dinner Friday evening in a restaurant to take stock of the revelation and emotional work of the passing week. After dinner, Susanne and I returned to sit at my mom’s bedside. Upon entering the Jewish nursing center, we were told she had just passed away. It was just after sundown. We solemnly entered her room. An extraordinary stillness filled the space. The light from the western sky glowed orange and lit her utterly quiet body. My mom had taken her last breath in solitude, during Jewish prayer services. “Death ends a life, but not a relationship,” wrote my mom about her own mother’s passing years earlier.

I believe my mom is with God. She is also present with me—in the vibration of memory, in her poetry, published books and journals, her letters, photographs and hand-made jasper jewelry.  She was a loving and steadfast mom, and as a child I took in her love the way a leaf takes in sunshine, just naturally. But especially in the last five years of her life when she was coping with serious disabilities, she showed me there is a way to surrender to the things in life we can’t control. She made it look ordinary, although I know it took bravery. She once said to me: “I’ve learned patience from people who have limitations. I’ve learned to accept my own impairments by living with others who are impaired.” At vigil’s end, I learned that death cannot separate us from God’s love. I learned how right it is to entrust our loved ones to God. It is not a choice but a reality. My mother took flight across a horizon unknown to me. My heart would have to catch up to its grace.  In the kinship of mothers and daughters, what we love is not to be fastened to this earth, but to be believed in.

We will all someday vanish into the unknown. It is in this mystery that each one of us will someday be entrusted to God in the place where we started and the place where we end.”

~ Barbara Underwood Scharff, Real Women, Real Wisdom: A Journey into the Feminine Soul