Mothers Lost, Mothers Found

Mother’s Day grew out of the history of two American Civil War matriarchs in Appalachia, Anne Reeves Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe. They were early feminists looking to provide women with better lives and to end the horrors of war. The federal holiday, championed by Anne’s daughter Anna M. Jarvis, centered the honoring of mothers, and especially her own mother, discarding the anti-war aspect. So, again, we are drawn into this observation — with which we struggled last month — the distinction between deep esoteric religion and shallow exoteric religion: I would argue that using reflections on motherhood and by mothers as an interrogation of the human condition and as a healing unguent for the causes of war or a well of deep gratitude for the gift of life and those whose labor delivers that gift… Well, those are pretty deep. But, humankinds’ predilection for the exoteric has made of Mother’s-Day another excuse for buying cut-flowers and gifts, another saccharine feel-good bromide where pro-forma gratitude replaces deep reflection and any acknowledgement of indebtedness. A shift so great, that even Anna M. Jarvis was repelled by the level of commercialization. Don’t get me wrong, I think that shallow gratitude is a significant improvement over no gratitude, and a major improvement over being taken-for-granted. But I’m not here, writing this, to improve your bromide supply — I’m here to invite you deeper into the work of being human — that is my calling, and I’m inviting you to discover yours.

With that background in mind — let’s get to the title of today’s episode: mothers lost, mothers found. I am going to share with you stories of four generations of mothers in my family — all of them lost, all of them deceased, all of them known, personally, by me. Through this storytelling, I am hoping to find them again. In the spirit of Orson Scott Card’s beautiful concept of a Speaker for the Dead, I hope to tell you some truths about their lives that, while they may be hard to hear, honor them — as human beings, as women who did the best that they could with what they had, as mothers, as daughters, as sisters, as siblings… about how their best intentions sometimes went sideways, about how they sometimes didn’t recover from adversity. And, in the end, I hope — an invitation to deep lessons that we can take away from these stories, lessons to help us heal ourselves, our families, our communities, and, indeed, the whole world. Let’s get started.

The earliest generation of my matrilineage that I knew personally was my great-grandmother Lorraine Cain. Now as great-grandmothers are prone to be, even to their eldest great-grandchildren — which I was — mine was already old when I was born, and was older still by the time I got old enough to remember her. She died when I was about 14, but not before I got to spend back-to-back summers in church with her when I was 12 and 13. I was first saved in a Free-Will Pentecostal Church that summer when I was 12, a church whose pastor was her youngest son and my great-uncle Wilber (though we all called him Web). But my most powerful memory of her was this: at the age of 13 I received the gift of healing in my church — and for those skeptics out there, I do mean faith-healing — and, as is customary upon such occasions, the pastor asked if anyone in church was afflicted. Well, my great-grandmother raised her hand and said she’d had a headache for two days that she couldn’t get rid of. So she stepped up to the pulpit and I laid hands on her, and I prayed hard for her well-being, for her to get some relief from this pain. And when she stepped back, she testified that the pain was gone, and she praised Jesus for the healing. Well, I was relieved — but still, in part of my mind, skeptical too. So, I casually cajoled my grandfather into bringing me around to her house later in the week, which was in the next town over, and I gently asked my great-grandmother if she was for real — if her headache really went away. She looked at me surprised at first, then with a look of gentleness, and she said that it had gone away, and that it hadn’t come back yet. A few weeks later she confided in me that the relief had lasted two whole weeks before she even had to take her pain meds again. I was happy for her. I was even more happy that she seemed to be proud of me, and mostly I tried not to be too incredulous or skeptical, which, even then, I recognized as something that short-circuits whatever gratitude we can muster in this life. She died the next year and I never saw her again after that summer.

Let’s move forward now one generation: with a favorite quip from my maternal grandmother: Erma Jean Baker:

If you’re dealing

and you’re not winning.

That’s on you!

I played poker, weekly, for about 18 years before the pandemic ended our habit, and when I’d share this tidbit with my fellow players, it never failed to get both a laugh and a look of incredulity — your GRANDMA used to say that? It just doesn’t fit in with most people’s stereotype of a grandmother. Well, that was my grandmother too… there were a number of stereotypes that just didn’t fit her.

Now look, there are a number of stereotypes that she did fit — stories I can tell you of her teaching Sunday school or helping out neighbors in a pinch with money or free childcare… but I think y’all are beginning to know me better than that. Everyone in my family will tell you THOSE stories, everyone likes telling the stories that support and bolster what they WANT, sometimes what they NEED to believe. I’m more interested, not in the salacious or in the defamatory, but I am more interested in the stories that help us grapple with the transmission of intergenerational trauma that keeps us stuck in adolescence and thwarts our efforts to ripen into the wise elders that future generations deserve.

So, I have to tell you the story of trauma that lies beneath my grandmother’s funny and oft-repeated witticism. I have to tell you about how she was the eldest daughter growing up in a rural alcoholic home with eight younger siblings — and how different her experience of her mother was, from my experience of my great-grandmother.

Now, according to my grandmother Erma, Lorraine Cain, as a young woman and mother, was a drinker and a carouser, a fierce card player and a sore loser. So, as soon as Erma was old enough to hold a deck of cards, she was roped into the card games whenever they needed a fourth. Lorraine would pair up with whoever the guest was, usually a relative or neighbor, and Erma would be teamed up with her father Archie. As she retold it to me, her instructions from her father were this: We have to lose, but your mother can never know that we lost on purpose. You might have to be a long-time card player in order to understand just how difficult and demanding this request is. You can’t play badly or ignorantly, that will get you scolded and criticized. You must learn how to win, to give every appearance of making it look like you are trying to win, but you must, instead, lose.

I need to pause here, I need you to hear this truth — I have had a very difficult time mourning my grandmother since she died last November. I’ve had a hard time grieving the woman who, the last time we visited with her, screamed — literally screamed! — at my wife for misplaying a card as we were trying to teach her how to play a friendly game of canasta… But as I wrote this story, as I imagined sharing it with you, I was able to deeply grieve her for the first time… not as the woman she had become, but as that little girl put in the nearly impossible position of throwing a card game to her drunk mother — not once, but over and over again, put in a position where YOU JUST CAN’T WIN. I was able to weep for her then, because no little girl deserves that… and when that sort of thing happens, some folks never recover.

…and as I was grieving I was gifted with another insight, a flash of memory of an offhand comment about how they’d play the radio while they played cards. And another mystery that’s always troubled me about my grandmother felt solved, the mystery of a person who didn’t and seemingly couldn’t enjoy music. How deep must have been the trauma of those nights that they destroyed both her ability to enjoy card games and her ability to enjoy music? How tragic is it for any human being to lose access to such powerful vehicles of play and joy in life? Like I said, I have struggled to find compassion for the difficult and bitter woman that my grandmother became — but when I pictured her as this little girl, caught between a rock and a drunk hard place, asked to do the impossible without recognition or hope of reward, well, it became a little easier to see THAT little girl inside of my grandmother, it became a little easier to see how the fear and the anxiety and winlessness of that story calcified into what she became. And I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful for this: despite all of the hardness and difficulty and disconnect that I’ve struggled through with with my grandmother — I am deeply grateful for her unconditional love, and I’m deeply grateful that I was able to return that unconditional love. Even in the many times when we found it impossible to approve of each other, that love made it possible for us to be together anyway.

It’s time to jump again, another generation, to my own mother. Cheri O’Brien. She was the eldest child of an eldest child, which make me the eldest child times-three (at least) and if that isn’t a recipe for Type-A behavior, I don’t know what is. So it was with my mom. Despite dropping out of high school to give birth to me, and despite having no college education to speak of, she had, by the time I was in college, worked herself from the secretarial pool all the way up to being one of a handful of senior executive secretaries at the Kennedy Space Center. And while I was in college, her boss, the Senior Vice President of something, decided to retire — and his gratitude for my mother and all they ways that she had helped him and made him successful at his job was such that he told her, “You need to put your talents to work for yourself, not just making guys like me look good.” Now, for the 1990’s that was some pretty good feminist allyship. So he helped her identify some jobs that fit her skills and he advocated for her, and she landed a big promotion — she became the head of logistics for the Space Shuttle Landing Team. And it wasn’t just a gift, it was an acknowledgment of her intelligence, both emotional and intellectual, and her hard work and her ability to get things done. And, a few years after she got that promotion, there was an accident and the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry — spreading debris across the southeastern United States. It was a landing gone wrong, and my mother’s team had a new job. A huge multi-month search party was organized that covered parts of five states including Texas and whose mission it was to recover every bit of debris from that accident that could be recovered, and my mom ended up running logistics for THAT. From warehouses to rental cars to hotels to flights to transport to reassembly, the weight of the Columbia recovery effort landed on her desk, and she handled it. She won a prestigious manned space flight award for her work on that project. (Don’t say I didn’t give you any happy stories.) But there’s a dark thread in this pattern that I have to reveal. On the day she received that promotion, a day when I’m sure she was plagued by the same imposter syndrome that haunts many of us when we take on a new challenge, on that day when she was filled with pride and excitement and a fair portion of fear, she went to tell her mother, Erma. She hoped for congratulations, she hoped for pride or approval, she hoped for support, what she got was this, “I hope you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew.” She called me in angry tears that night, that’s been hard to forgive.

Look folks, I’ve been a devout feminist since the early 90’s — you can thank my first wife for that, I do. But what I want to talk about today, what’s calling this episode forth from me, is the observation from within my own family of what I can only call woman-to-woman misogyny. This is not to give men or patriarchy or any other misogynist current a pass of any kind, but it is to notice that some significant portion of the cultural oppression of women is propagated by women against each other. I say this also because I have faith that women can and will answer the call to end this misogyny, the call to heal, the call back into right relationship: mother to daughter, daughter to mother, sister to sister, sibling to sibling. I wish that my family was an outlier, a big exception, in a world where women are united in solidarity against their own oppression. Sadly, this is no more true in feminism than it is in anti-racism work or within any other oppressed group that I’ve studied. Let me be clear — I am not ‘calling out’ my great-grandmother or my grandmother, I am not shaming them or blaming them. I am telling their story as honestly, earnestly, cogently, and compassionately as I can — because I wish to learn from it, because I wish to heal from it… and because I wish for that learning and healing for you. Will listening to my story be enough for you? I don’t know. You may have to find your own story, or that of your mother, or of your mother’s mother… and you may have to sift that story for hard truths and tiny cracks that might let the light and compassion seep in… maybe, who knows, there are more stories…

Four years after Challenger they found that my mother had brain cancer, stage 4, two years later — just six weeks after Christie and I adopted our son Simon — she died.

I have two younger sisters: one born when I was eight, Kelly, and the other born when I was twelve, Erin. Since I was significantly older and since I started working while going to school at age 15 and since I moved away to college when I was 17 — I didn’t spend a lot of childhood time with my sisters. I feel like I was, for them, the almost mythological older brother who rolls into town for Christmas on his motorcycle — and I did do that a few times. But I assumed, partly because I didn’t pay attention — or enough attention — or the right kind of attention — and partly because I wasn’t there, but anyway, I assumed that they had received from our mother, the same kinds of things I had received from her — at least in terms of the things I was grateful for:

• My mother loved me unconditionally and she expressed that love frequently and intensely and earnestly.
• My mother had faith and confidence in me: supported me, believed in me and in my ability to ‘be anything I wanted to be’, and she expressed that support frequently and earnestly — often at times when I needed it most.

Of course, I thought — from my position of eldest-born-male-child-privilege — of course my mother would unconditionally love my sisters in the same way she had me, of course she would support them and believe in them the same way she had for me… In hindsight, I can’t believe how long I was able to sustain this fiction, the evidence was there, early on.

• When I was young, say first grade, I fell behind in reading. I just wasn’t getting it like the other kids, whatever it was, when the teachers brought it to my parents, they insisted I get extra help and I did. And then they insisted that I get tested for the gifted program, because they thought that my exceptional-ness was being misinterpreted as a learning problem. So, I got tested and I got tutored, and I didn’t get held back a grade and I did get put into the gifted program — what was a tremendous relief, one day a week, from the normal tedium of grade school… and so it went, with me, through grade school and high school and college and graduate school — on the honors track, on the smart track, on the going-somewhere track. And just like any adolescent would, I gave my-SELF full credit for all of it.
• When my sisters were in a similar situation — early school, struggling a bit for reasons no one could quite put a finger on. Something different happened. There was no “maybe they are too smart for that classroom, maybe they are bored.” There was no advocacy, no gifted testing… I remember arguing with my parents about it. I remember saying it was a mistake. I hadn’t yet studied how tracking works in school systems, but I new intuitively that this decision would last… almost forever. I knew it was wrong, I knew that my sisters deserved the same benefit of the doubt, the same unrelenting advocacy that I had gotten, but they were denied. They were, each of them, four years apart, held back a grade. Tracked into the not-honors group, the not-so-smart track, the not-going-anywhere track.

My sister Kelly didn’t make it through high school. At 14 she ran away from home, out of state, she was gone for two years before we heard from her. For many years, if the phone rang in the night my first thought was that her luck had run out. She struggled with drug addiction. She had a daughter Chloe (who is graduating from high school in two weeks) and she placed a few more kids through adoption. Chloe was raised by my mother and step-father for a bit, then by her father for a decade or so, then by my grandmother Erma, until she died last year. My sister Kelly was the kind of mother they tell cautionary tales about. The kind of daughter who wasn’t welcome at my mother’s deathbed because she just couldn’t take another dose of heartbreak. The kind of sister you want to help, but can’t figure out how. The kind you keep wishing will get clean and stay clean long enough that she might get used to it, might finally find a way out of that maze she wandered into too young. That didn’t happen for her, a little over two years ago the call I had long feared finally came. She’d run out of luck and died of a fentanyl overdose. She was 40 years old.

I went to Florida to deliver her eulogy, as I had done for my mother. I refused to play the game that some in the family wanted, the one where we pretended she wasn’t an addict, the one where we pretended that she hadn’t died of an overdose. I delivered a powerful and honest eulogy — it brought most of the assembled to wracking sobs — I felt I had done my work. But it wasn’t the greatest blessing that day, not even close. As you can imagine, given what I’ve shared about my sister, I didn’t think much of her friends and companions. She had a friend, Larry Paciorek, who, from what I could tell, did his best to be a good friend to my sister. As is the tendency with protective older brothers, I was wary of this older man’s interest in my younger sister. Larry died about a year before Kelly and Larry’s sister was at the my sister’s memorial. She came up to me afterwards and said this, “That’s the second best eulogy I’ve ever seen, but the one your sister did for my brother was better.” She then went on to describe, as best she could through her own tears, the renditions of Shakespeare that my sister wove together for her friend Larry in remembrance of him… I didn’t even know that my sister liked Shakespeare, half-less that she had committed enough of it to memory to perform it unscripted and interwoven in honor of her friend… that was the blessing, that was the hard lesson — the demolition of any residual doubt that my sister Kelly had deserved any less advocacy and faith in her early years than I had received. She was a human miracle who couldn’t live with the diminished expectations the world had of her.

On the second anniversary of her death, just this past spring, my living sister Erin and I met at a cabin in the woods, and for the first time in our lives — as kids or adults — it was just the two of us, in a world made smaller by the deaths of so many mothers we had loved. We gathered, dedicating some time and attention to strengthening our own relationship, remembering together the people and situations we had lived through. In our conversations that weekend, what I had suspected and should have known was made clear: if my inheritance from my mother had been unconditional love and unconditional faith — my sisters, both of them, had only received half of that inheritance.

I asked, “Didn’t mom used to tell you, as she did me, that you could do or be anything you wanted to be?”

“No.” my sister answered, “Mom would look at me with a bit of pity in her eyes and say, ‘Sorry Sis, but your brother got all the brains.’”

The stories we tell matter, not least because we believe them.

Now, I won’t tell you the story of my sister Erin — she is alive and well — and her story is hers to tell. I’ll confine myself to this: she has also proven in recent years, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she should have been granted the same unconditional support in her youth that I received. I’m proud that she is also a human miracle, one who’s figured out how to defy the world’s diminished expectations of her. Nor can I tell you the stories of my nieces Chloe and Kayleigh — who are still just writing the first chapters of their own stories. But what I hope for these women in my matrilineage, this mother, these two daughters, is that they will hear these stories I’ve shared today. That they will BE the generations that break the cycle of trauma and misogyny in my family — and that the next generations of women in my family and beyond will stand together.

Mothers, daughters, and siblings united in unconditional love, in unconditional support of one another, free from the toxic influence of misogyny, and free from every type of dehumanization.

May it be so.