Madre

I owe my mom an apology. We only speak on the phone, at best, once a month. I remember when my brother was overseas for 2 years, he, too, struggled staying in touch with the woman who had pushed him into the world (okay, so a doctor had to pull him out with a pair of forceps but my mom made a valiant, 18-hour effort). I think we all find it a little difficult to make space for a FaceTime call to family when we are far away. There’s a lot of excuses I could make for why it’s this way with me. But I think, at the root, it’s because I know that whether or not we talk, nothing is going to uproot my relationship with my mom. So I get lazy.

But also sometimes I get lost in differences.

I am so very different from my mom, from what her life was when she was 25. The difference still makes me feel a little sad.

For the longest time, my “plan” was to build a house on my parents’ land and whenever I made apple pie from the trees that grew outback, I’d make two so I, or one or my babies, could walk the extra down the road to my mom.

It’s the family life, the close-to-the-earth life—the Wendell Berry life, if you will.

I’ve always been enchanted by my mom’s lifestyle and have wanted to emulate it. Yet the emulation has proved elusive. It started when, at the end of my 18th year, I was unmarried. And then plot by plot, we sold our farm. As I stumbled into my 20s, still single, my mom was always quick to admit that she didn’t understand, from experience, what I was going through.

Even so, she always held me, always listened, always shared some words, always reminded me that she was praying for me. She held me through each relationship that didn’t quite work out, was there to blow the tears off my face. Once, she caught my tears in a little blue bottle, symbolically.

After all that, she couldn’t be there for my victory. She wasn’t there to share my joy when I got married in a back office 6 months ago today. She let a man she had never met take her job of holding me.

And our lives diverged drastically in a way I’d never anticipated.

...or, did they?

Maybe our tides are different, maybe the moon has pulled us in different directions, but the heartbeat in the chest sunk deep in the ocean is the same.

A couple thousand years ago, Paul, a founder of the early evangelical Christian church, wrote a letter to a young man named Timothy. He said, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well” (2 Timothy 1:5, ESV).

Like Timothy, I have my mother’s faith. Every day of my childhood she carefully, creatively persevered and put her faith in me through how she treated me, how she guided my pursuits, through the books she read to me, whether Laura Ingles Wilder or Isabel Kuhn. And just, how she lived day-in and day-out, you know?

My mother and I have a common faith.

In the midst of all the differences, in the midst of the miles between us, faith binds us together. It’s my mom’s faith that made drastic changes in her own life.

Years before I was, my mom and dad were in the Dominican Republic, “catching vision,” as they say, for a future of missions. My mom decided while in the DR that she was going to become a registered nurse mid-life. If someone does something as crazy as that, how could her daughter not do something crazy too?

And though the theme of this entry is my mom, I need to pull my dad into the picture here too, because he and she are one. One faith. As if it’s not apparent, anything she does, he’s giving it energy.

All of us in this faith, we are all one.

But we all know there’s potential for a unique connection between a mother and her daughter.

So Mom, I’m looking at you. I’m thinking about you all the time. I’m sorry I don’t talk to you more. 

You gave me life. Thank you. Even though I have my own family now in a different country and this life I’m living is my passion—you are in everything I do, dawn to sundown, sundown to dawn.

I haven’t built that bridge yet between our two countries, like I told you I was going to do. But look and see—there’s already a rainbow, streams of colors, the colors of faith, arcing over the water.