What I learned from my Mother

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse

May 13, 2012

Mama had a particular view of the world, shaped by her strong Christian faith, her love for children, her growing up as a missionary kid in India. Spiders in the house’s windows? No problem. Twelve cats? Fine. Missing a tithe payment to the church? Very Dangerous!

Reading: Joy in Ordinary Time

My Mama was a second grade teacher at the Gladwyne Elementary School in the rich suburbs of Philadelphia. She loved the children, but she was shy with the parents, who were financiers, pro ball players and attorneys, members of the Junior League, cricket clubs, fox- hunting clubs. For Christmas she would get amazing presents. One year she got a bottle of Joy perfume, then 150 dollars an ounce. I don’t know that she ever wore it. She was keeping it for a special occasion. She kept it so long that it finally evaporated.

About other things she was more openhanded. We had grandfather’s china and silver, which she often used. “That’s what they are meant for, to be used, she said. no sense in saving them. you’d never see them at all that way.”

That openhandedness didn’t extend to her own person. She wore sensible clothes, comfortable shoes, white cotton underwear. She had grown up the child of missionaries, and, whether she wanted it or not, that background was deep in her. She looked respectable and kind. She was cute and cheerful and funny.

Joy perfume didn’t fit who she seemed to be. A daughter never sees all the sides of her mother, though. It makes me smile to think that she harbored a hope that there would come an occasion where it could be her, where she might walk into a room smelling rich and sophisticated, cherished and valued, where it would be just the thing for her to wear. She let my sister and me smell it whenever we wanted to. The bottle sat like an honored but intimidating guest on her dresser. Whenever we smelled it we marveled at how much it had cost. I don’t remember it ever occurring to me to wear it.

I want to let his lesson deep into me. Celebrate the body, the trooper of a body that carries you through life, that pleasures you and lets you dance. Celebrate your body now, before you have lost the weight, before you get your muscle definition, before you feel justified by the harsh eyes of your expectations.

Celebrate being alive, drawing breath, celebrate that you are achingly sad today and that it will pass. It is good to be able to feel feelings. Celebrate that there was a love so big and good that it hurts to lose it. That there was a time so sweet that you ache, remembering. Celebrate those things. Honor the flowering of the tomato plants, the opening of the day lilies, the lemon smell of magnolias. Honor the ache of your heart and the tears falling. Life is mostly ordinary time. Ordinary time, shot through with light and pain and love. Lavish joy on ordinary time. Hope is a wonderful thing, but not if it makes you put off splashing yourself with Joy.

Sermon: What I Learned From My Mother

Happy Mother’s Day. I want to talk to you this morning about my mother, Katherine Pressly Hamilton. She grew up in India until the age of 16. Missionary kid. Her parents were missionaries to the Hindus and Muslims who at that time lived mixed together in and around the town of Lahore, now in Pakistan. When she got to high school she hung out with the other international students, as she didn’t fit with the boys and girls who were raised in the States. When I knew her, she remembered a little Hindi, a little Urdu from those years. I heard it when we were washing dishes; she would sing hymns in Urdu. One year in seminary I invited an Ethiopian student and a Pakistani student named Sam home for Thanksgiving and he cried when she spoke to him. He said she had such a village accent it made him terribly homesick. The Ethiopian Marxist priest from Moscow we had invited converted to Capitalism while playing Monopoly, but that’s another story.

When they were children they would come from India on the boat for furlough. Grandfather would preach and the children would sing. They had a good sense of mischief, and they would change the words to: “Please pass the beer.” Their parents’ Hindi and Urdu wasn’t good enough to catch it. Mama said her aunts would always cry when the children got off the boat. It wasn’t until she was grown that one of them finally told her it was because the children all looked so pitiful in their clothes that had come from the “missionary barrel.” The kids didn’t know the clothes were ten years out of style and that not everyone wore things with some little stain or tear. Whenever something I had on had a little spot on the front or had a safety pin holding up the hem or needed ironing, she would always say “Just throw back your shoulders, smile big and no one will notice.” Mama was a believer in smiling. She preferred to stay happy. Part of how she stayed happy was to see things in the most positive possible way. “The say I had you children was the happiest of my life. Every minute of it was wonderful. Wonderful. “Willfully positive” is how I would describe the style she taught me. Even about her marriage. She and my father didn’t live together from the time I was three years old. They stayed married, though. She would say, “Your father is a difficult man. But I love him.” Then I found a survey in a Readers Digest she had left lying on the floor in her bathroom. One question asked “If you had it to do over again, would you get married?” She had checked. “No” I was shocked. He came to supper every night and stayed the evening before going home to his apartment in town. Children get used to how their family does things. If I had thought about it I wouldn’t have been shocked, I just didn’t really have to think about it because she threw her shoulders back and smiled. We all did. Smiled and didn’t think about it. She smiled big about teaching second grade. She said she loved it. Loved it.

She never complained, and she told funny stories at the dinner table about what happened with the children. She had to have a nap when she came home. I used to tease her about that until one day when I was fourteen I went with her to class and came home exhausted after a day of trying to keep up with 24 8 year olds. I had to take a BIG nap. She would tell elephant jokes and knock-knock jokes and we would groan. When we were camping she would lay out the plastic plates, which were in four bright colors, saying, “Purple, green, yellow, red.” “Ma, we know our colors, we’re not in second grade.” She took us camping for six weeks at a time and smiled. Three teenage girls in a VW camper: my sister, me and a friend. I learned adventuring from her. She would just go without a plan, without a clue as to what was going to happen. My little sister and I alternated being able to take a friend with us. We would get an NEA chartered red-eye to Europe and drive our white VW camper bus all over, finding campsites at night. We girls would set up the tent and sleep in it, and she would sleep in the camper. Whenever we got to a campsite she would look for boys for us. The way you find boys is by looking for pup tents. We would drive around until we spotted one with an empty site next door, and then we’d set up in the empty spot. She would put on a pot of spaghetti and then go next door and knock, and ask if we could run a line for laundry from our site to theirs, and by the way, would they like to join us for supper? We’d get out the guitar and sing after supper and flirt and have a wonderful time. If there weren’t any boys we’d have belching contests. Mama was a lady in so many ways, she taught me to drive with admonitions to drive gracefully, moving my hands over the steering wheel with wrists held limply, but she could win any belching contest. I’ve done my best to learn that from her too. Be a lady when you need to be, but don’t take it camping. She always paid a tithe, a tenth of her salary to the church. One summer we broke down crossing the Mohave Desert. The car cost a couple of hundred dollars to repair. “I know God was joking with me,” she said. That was exactly what my tithe was, and I held it back this month because of our trip. He was telling me not to do that.”

She was virtuous in her schedule. She woke up every morning at 5 and prayed until 6. It’s what she did instead of confronting us when she was worried. So she prayed until 6 and then practiced her violin. She wasn’t very good, but she played in the Main Line symphony in the back row. And she kept it up. She practiced. She taught me that a thing worth doing is worth doing badly if it gives you joy. She kept smiling when she got a lump in her breast. First she tried to not confront it. I’m sure she prayed. The lump didn’t go away. She waited a year to go to the doctor. He performed a mastectomy and radiation. Then another mastectomy. She was in and out of the hospital for the next five years. We kept hearing the cancer was gone and then it would come back. I learned not to hope. She always did, though. She said, “Meggie, everything that happens to me is good, because God is good.” I remember arguing with her one time about that, and then deciding that someone’s faith was more important to them in a situation like that than arguing the truth of what they believed. If believing that was comforting to her, then I needed to support her in it. It had already done its harm – kept her from going to the doctor early enough. Let her enjoy its benefits.

She also went to faith healers. They said she wasn’t healed because there was an un-confessed sin in her life. This saintly childlike woman searched her soul for what the sin might be. It infuriated me that she was loving and believing in a god who would sit up with arms crossed and say “I could heal you but I’m not going to because you have an un-confessed sin in your life and I’m not even going to tell you what that is.” That helped make me a Unitarian Universalist, because it was one of the many things that made no sense, and that wasn’t even their worst offense.

Mama was excruciatingly honest in most things. Once we drove all the way out of a drive-in movie because she had paid the under-twelve price for my sister, who had just turned twelve. I came home from school one day to find her crying at the kitchen table. She was feeling horrible because a postcard had come for me and she had read it.

Her cancer made her honest about the rest. She was in Kings Mountain with her sister and her mother, and her mother gave her some advice and she responded, disagreeing. Her mother sighed in a martyred tone, “How sharper then a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child.” Mama spoke sharply to her mother for the first time and said “Mother, I am NOT your child. I am forty six years old. ” When she was telling me this story she teared up and said, Meggie, I know I have treated you like a child and you’re not one, and I apologize. Well, I was about 21 and I thought I WASN’T a child at that point, so I said something gracious like “Oh, Mom, you’ve never really done that…. but she wasn’t finished. She said “If I had it all to do over again, I believe I’d say “no” to you less when you were little. We said “no, no” all the time. I remembered that when I was raising my boys.

Mama never did tell the truth, though, about dying. She was always claiming that she was really healed this time. Her faith won out over her experience and common sense. She didn’t talk about dying until right at the end. She called where I was in seminary and said “I think the Lord is taking me. ” A kind student drove me the hour and a half home and I got to sleep by her sofa through that last night. She would drift and we would call her name, and she’d say “Just a minute, I’ll be right back.” She died the next morning early. I value all the things I learned from her. I value choosing to be positive. I value music and laughter and wanting to make a difference in people’s lives. I’m glad for what I learned to do from watching her do it and what I learned NOT to do from watching her do it. My values are different from hers, but I carry her with me. I know you all carry your mothers too.

It is my hope that, on this Mothers’ Day, we can all bless our mothers for what they have given us and let go of the things they tried to give us that aren’t workable in our lives. May we forgive them their faults, if we can afford to. May we understand that we don’t have to become just like them if we think about it and live with intention.

It is my hope that those of us who are parents can remember that we have given our children many treasures, and that we also have given them things they will let go of as unworkable for them, and that is how it should be.