The Girl from Ohio: A Mother's Day Tribute

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts. – Washington Irving

Richard Nixon once said that his mother was a “saint.” On this point, at least, he may have told the truth. Even saints give birth to sinners. It is a sentiment shared by many sons, including me, about their mothers. But we are often reluctant to speak of our mothers in such sentimental terms. I am not trying to suggest that my mom is a saint in the ecclesiastical sense. In the movie Michael, John Travolta portrays an angel who protests, “I’m not THAT kind of angel.” My mother might also protest that she is not THAT kind of “saint,” but her life is surely a testament to the goodness of God’s creations.

Born and bred a country girl, Mom spent the first three years of her life in Parkersburg, West Virginia, then moved with her family to a large, white-pillared estate in Akron, Ohio, the place she called home the remainder of her childhood. But it was neither an ideal setting nor an ideal childhood. Her father was an attorney who made his money in construction and real estate, a conservative and serious man with traditional notions of gender roles and class structures. Although he never showed my mom much love or affection, she continues to hold firm to the notion that he tried his best. You see, my mom always sees the best in everyone and refuses to believe that some people can be simply self-absorbed or cruel.

When my mom was eight years old, she was sent to live in West Virginia with her Aunt Boe, her father’s sister, for part of the summer. She had fun there, but looked forward to returning home to her mother’s embrace. When she arrived home, however, her mother was not there. Annoyed at her questions - “Where’s Mom?” - her father deployed Norm, Mom’s 13 year-old brother, to inform her of the news. “Mom is no longer living with us,” Norm said, “Pop and Mom are getting divorced.” Her father never said one word about it nor concerned himself with the effect of this news on his daughter. Although unusual in those days, Mom remained with her father in the cold, formal house in Akron, only occasionally seeing her mother, until she could be sent away to boarding school. Never really understanding why it happened, Mom remained close to her mother and chose not to assign blame to anyone for this turn of events. Years later, it was my mom who took care of my grandmother when she was old, sick, and lacking financial means; and Mom was by her side the night she died.

For any young child, the news that your family is breaking apart is devastating, as it surely was for my mom. Yet, she always possessed a soulful, powerful sense of God’s presence. Anyone who does not believe in God should speak to my mother. Raised in a religiously indifferent family, her father rarely attended church and did nothing to encourage it. But from the time her parents divorced, Mom awoke every Sunday morning and walked alone to the local Presbyterian Church, where she attended Sunday school classes and worship services. When she returned home, she would find her father and two brothers asleep, or off to the racetrack, or attending to their more secular concerns. Looking back, Mom has said, “I really think God took me in my arms and held me. It is something I always felt.”

When Mom was thirteen, her father sent her away to Hathaway Brown, a select all-girls boarding school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. Her classmates came from some of the wealthiest and most accomplished families in Ohio. They were fast and sophisticated, far different from Mom, who remained in many ways the innocent country girl from West Virginia. Alone among her peers, she continued to attend church each Sunday – a prominent American Baptist church with an engaging pastor and innovative worship services. Many of her classmates would go on to attend some of the nation’s finest universities – Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe and Barnard. As a straight-A student, Mom could have attended any of these schools, but my grandfather believed her education was sufficient at Hathaway Brown, which he perceived as a finishing school, a reflection of the times and of women’s role in society in the late 1940’s. Though she rarely contradicted her father’s decisions about her life, Mom had other ideas about college. There were no father-daughter college visits, but at least Grandpa accepted Mom’s ambition to attend college. Although she seriously considered all-girls Smith College in Massachusetts, she opted instead for the less pretentious, coeducational Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she would eventually meet my dad and begin a new life.

Mom and Dad exchanged vows on September 1, 1951, and, nearly six decades later, they remain happily married, two people who share a love and devotion rarely seen in today’s fast-paced culture. That she has remained with my Dad for sixty years alone may qualify my mother for sainthood. I tease my father often that he “married up,” but he only laughs a little at this remark, for secretly he realizes just how true is the sentiment, and what a lucky man he has been.

A lesser person might well have despaired the kind of childhood that my mother lived, separated from a loving mother, living with an uncaring father and sent away to boarding school. But through it all my mom maintained a deep and abiding faith. It is, I believe, why she remains to this day secure in the face of life’s challenges and why her life is devoted to serving others: her family and her church, her former students, the PTA, a neighbor grieving over a lost relative, a homeless man on a street corner, anyone needing a helping hand. She is a woman of great empathy and compassion for others, almost to a fault, with little concern for self-recognition. Everyone who has ever met my mom has been swept away by her abundant optimism and sunny disposition. Whatever life throws her way, she can turn darkness into sunshine with an almost surreal energy.

My mother has always been compelled to serve. When I was growing up with my sister and brother in New Jersey, Mom took care of everyone and everything. She tended to our family in a way that is less appreciated in current times, but was profoundly important in developing our family’s character and strength. She was always there for us and, even when she started work, first as a librarian and later as a school teacher, she always managed each night to have dinner on the table, keep the house neat, and clean and fold the laundry. She fed and walked the dog, cleaned the dishes, chauffeured us to basketball practices and orchestra rehearsals, helped with our homework and still had time to prepare her lesson plans for the next day. When I played Little League, it was Mom with catcher’s mitt in hand, crouched down from forty-five feet away, who caught my formidable fastballs. She would never allow me to take something off my pitches to her, to treat her as a “girl,” for she was a solid athlete in her own right. At Hathaway Brown, she often reminded me, she was a star field hockey, basketball, and softball player, one who could keep up with her older brothers.

If that were not enough, Mom also faithfully fulfilled the role as a pastor’s wife and, later, “First Lady” of the New Jersey Lutheran Synod when my dad was its President. She hosted dinner parties on Saturday nights, attended both church services on Sunday mornings when my dad preached, helped with the coffee hour, and then volunteered for church activities during the week. She rarely said no to anyone, constantly overextending herself to serve as a Sunday school teacher and chairperson of the Lutheran women’s group. She coordinated a prayer chain one week, visited shut-ins the next, and made cookies for the Girl Scouts when she was not otherwise packing our lunches or folding our laundry or putting us to bed. Come to think of it, Dad, what the hell did you do?

“A mother is a person,” quipped Tennerva Jordan, “who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” Self-sacrificing to a fault, there have been times that my mother’s excessive zeal to serve her family and others has caused me to become a touch exasperated. When we visit, even now, I will enter the kitchen in the morning and exclaim, “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll make my own breakfast.” But I have to elbow her out of the way, as she insists on buttering my English muffin (“I don’t want butter”) or pouring my coffee (“I can do it myself”). If she would only listen to me, I painstakingly protest, I could go about my business and all would be well. But it is to no avail.

I know, I know. What’s a son to do? I feel guilty for insufficiently appreciating Mom’s unwavering efforts. Despite my exasperation, I know that Mom’s insistence on doing these things is an expression that she wants only the best for me and for all of us, that her love is infinite and endless. If she could, she would give us the world. Instead, she has attempted to serve the world. As a schoolteacher in the 1970’s, Mom taught scores of first-graders to read and, as the letters from her students attest, she greatly influenced and molded their young lives. Today, as a grandmother of six and the adopted grandmother of several young families in her neighborhood, she continues spreading to others a bright and shining love that perhaps, in today’s cynical and fast-paced world, only young children can fully appreciate.

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds,” wrote Kate Douglas Wiggin. “Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, comrades and friends – but only one mother in the whole world.” There is a reason why mothers are special, for they bring us into this world, then watch over us as we try to find our way. In the end, for a special few, they remain true to their lifelong purpose, to make their children feel the unique love that only a “Mom” can dispense. And that is what makes a mother a “saint.”

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

Reflections on My Grandfather: Memories and Lost Opportunities

We stood at the door of my grandfather’s house, a country rancher on a horse farm in north central Ohio. My parents had been driving all day, three children and a dog in tow, so that we could make our annual summer visit to my mother’s father and her stepmom. It was dark outside and no porch light was on, when we rang the door bell. We stood there waiting, and waited some more, until it seemed like five or six minutes went by. Are they home? They are expecting us, aren’t they? Finally, my grandfather came to the door. “Oh, hi Janie,” he said to my mom impassively, “How are you?”

As a young boy, not more than eight years old, this was confusing. I was excited to arrive at my grandfather’s house. I knew that my brother and I would have a great time there, running up and down the long dirt-drive that connected the two horse barns; petting the horses while sneaking them sugar cubes and carrots; and hitting fly balls to each other in the open expanse of grass behind Grandpa’s granite back porch and goldfish pond. But Grandpa never seemed very glad to see us. Maybe he loved all of us and simply had a hard time showing it. He was not a man who expressed emotions freely; a lawyer and shrewd businessman, he had made good money in construction and real estate over the years, had two oil wells on his property, and at one time owned more than 30 thoroughbred race horses. Despite his wealth and good fortune, he did not share much of it with his family. When my father asked him for a small loan shortly after marrying my mom in the early 1950’s so that he could purchase a car, my grandfather declined, stating that his money “was all tied up.” When he died, he left my mom and her two brothers very little, instead passing almost all of his net worth onto his second wife, my Aunt Jean, a woman of independent means who would eventually leave it all to distant relatives (she had no children of her own).

He was not much of a father to my mom nor much of a grandfather to her children. Only once in my lifetime did he ever visit us. When I was six years old, he stopped by our house in southern New Jersey wearing his custom bow tie and fedora, said hello and sat on the living room couch for ten minutes, then continued to Atlantic City, where he was entering one of his horses in a stakes race. I sensed that he never greatly valued my mom as a daughter, though perhaps this was a reflection of his old-fashioned tastes and outdated, traditional views on the inferior roles of women. My mom and he had very little in common; she had long since expanded beyond her days as a boarding student at the prestigious Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, where Grandpa sent her throughout her teen years. She had developed into a liberal Democrat and devout Christian, while he remained very conservative in his politics and had little connection to whatever semblance of faith he may have retained. He was a country club Republican who viewed the world from very narrow lenses, with little sympathy for the less fortunate and little tolerance for people different than himself.

Despite this, now that he has been gone for nearly three decades, I sometimes wish that he had lived longer, so that I could have talked to him as an adult and gotten to know him better. I would have liked to have discussed areas of mutual interest – the law, politics, and even horse racing. He and Jennifer, my oldest daughter, might have bonded over horses – maybe he could have helped make real her dream of one day training race horses. I could have learned a lot from my grandfather, despite his significant shortcomings. As with so much of life, we can only wonder.

In reality, I know very little about my grandfather’s life. Although he graduated with a law degree in the early 1920’s and used his legal training to assist him in his business endeavors, he died during my first year in law school. I never had a chance to talk with him in depth about the law as a profession. Had he lived longer, maybe he would have been proud to have a grandson who became a federal prosecutor. I would have liked to have talked to him about my courtroom experiences, about the art of cross examination and arguing to judges and juries. I have always been a little envious of my colleagues who had family members in the law, who could turn to fathers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters, as professional mentors and guides.

Grandpa and I would not have agreed on much politically, but I would have enjoyed debating him. And had he lived longer, when I developed an interest in horse racing – a sport to which I am attracted for its speed, beauty and rich history – I would have loved accompanying him to the track, gaining insight into the business side of racing, and listening to his stories of hope and heartbreak, disappointment and exuberance. My favorite room in his house was always his study. I recall spending hours there examining his collection of trophies and pictures from the winner’s circle that lined the dark wood paneling and built-in book shelves. It was a room of someone important, of an accomplished man who had succeeded in life, or so I thought as a ten year-old child that knew little of life’s realities.

Whatever deficiencies he may have had as a man, Grandpa was the only grandfather I ever knew. My dad’s father died long before I was born. I know now, as I enter into my sixth decade of life, that those fortunate enough to have had a loving grandfather or two are very lucky, for grandfathers have a lot of wisdom and life experience to offer. Having lived through history, they have the benefit of hindsight from which to talk of the present. Grandfathers can teach you what they have learned in life, including mistakes made along the way. A grandfather’s perspective, formed from years of experience, can guide, inform, teach, and influence.

My grandfather was born in 1901 and, by the time he died in 1983, he had lived through the inventions of the automobile, the assembly line, airplane travel, television and the computer; he saw the growth of the interstate highway system and the development of space travel; and he experienced two world wars, a great depression, and the social and sexual revolutions of the sixties and seventies. Just when I was old enough and ready to learn from him, he was no longer around to talk to me. Would he have been there for me had he lived longer?

I don’t recall any truly meaningful conversation that I ever had with my grandfather. I am sure he is not fully to blame, as I was too young or too limited in my own interests – too focused on baseball, or girls, or basketball, or school, or football – to understand the importance of grandfathers. My grandmothers, not surprisingly, paid much closer attention to their grandchildren and made clear their love of us. I have few regrets about them. Grandmothers historically and universally perform their tasks much better than grandfathers. My grandfather certainly failed in this respect. But I do not want to judge him too harshly. I’d like to think he tried his best. I just wish he and I had tried a little harder.