There are three things I would love for you to know about my mom:
– She is an artist. And a very, very good one, at that. She has been painting for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid and would stay home from school for illness, she would haul me from bed and have me sit in her studio and pose so she could do life drawing sketches. I was almost an adult before I realized that providing the home’s artwork was not considered a staple of the SAHM duties and that regular people actually bought artwork.
I was relieved to figure that out; I have no ability in this area at all and we would have been royally out of luck, because you kind of have to cajole her a bit to get one of her paintings. And even then she considers them on loan, like from the Louvre.
She’s multi-media, too. One year it’s oil, and then the next it’s water color, and then after a while it’s colored pencil or pastels.
– She draws people in. No one just waits on Mom in a restaurant, or sells her cut flowers at Safeway. No, everyone who interacts with her becomes family. Mom waits in line at Penney’s to buy jeans and winds up hearing the entire life story of the woman behind her. There’s something about Mom that encourages people to tell her everything, and I do mean everything, about their lives. She should be working for the NSA; there’d be no reason for waterboarding. Just take the suspect in for half an hour with Patricia and she’d get it all, whether Dick Cheney wanted it or not.
And she remembers them all. And their stories. That lady from Penney’s? I’m certain that Mom remembers every traumatic thing that woman told her, and I’m willing to bet a lot that Mom still will remember her in her prayer list, which has got to be forty pages long right now.
Which leads me to the third thing.
– Mom is a woman of prayer. If you ever have a special intention, a crisis, a concern, you tell her and she’ll drop a rosary on your behalf. She takes note of the issue and then calls back for follow up. Seriously. “How did your friend’s chemo come out? Should I be saying prayers of thanksgiving?”
I cannot tell you how many times I have reached out to Mom on my own behalf, or on yours. If you know me, even only electronically, and you have ever experienced a crisis, Mom has prayed on it. And she does it a lot: when Dad had to quit driving, one of the worst fallouts was that they had to ultimately quit going to Adoration Chapel at 3 a.m. every Thursday morning.
One day we were visiting her and I mentioned that I wanted to get a rosary. She said, “You want a rosary?” and dug into her pocket and pulled one out and handed it to me.
I still have it. I store it in the place I had seen her store hers for years: on the bedpost. It’s a plain one, black beads. It has a lot of miles on it; countless hours of praying for her family, and for you.
It is a source of great comfort to me to know that Mom is in there pitching for me. I don’t know what I will do the day I can’t call her and say, “Hey, something big is going on; can you put me on the list?” and wait for her while she finds a pencil to write down whatever silly thing I’m worried about now. (I have a sneaking suspicion that when I do call, she stops everything and gets Dad and makes him drop and give her a decade, too.)
Today is Mother’s Day, and I can tell you right now, at 7 a.m. that, even if I discover I won Powerball last night; even if my own children get me selected as Mother of the Year; even if I discover oil in my backyard…the Besst thing about today is that I get to go visit Mom this afternoon.
© E. Stocking Evans 2014
Mom, Interrupted 