Right at the gate

February 15, 2013
Right at the gate

Someone said once about my mother that the tragedy of her life was that she had to grow up; but it wasn’t a tragedy, only a sorrow. She seems to have thought she wouldn’t have to. Growing up was for her much older brother; since he managed it, let it be on her behalf as well as his.

          So when she married, she was a child bride, though she was older than my dad. Why they married “someone” may know; I don’t. They were in high school together. She was lovely as rain; when he came back from the war, all grown up, he dared ask her and she said yes.

          Then, she was pregnant; and before they’d been married a year I was born. And on her hands. Dad was too busy doing what men did then; children were under what-women-do.

          They didn’t, or at least I didn’t, require she be a woman to do it, an all-grown-up girl. That she bore me made her my mother, but she could treat me more as a little brother than a son. Note: “little brother,” not doll.

          Girls of her generation may have read to their dolls, but they didn’t get carried away with it. She spent − more than hours, more than days − months reading to me. I would sit on her lap or nestled into her side; or she would sit arm against me on the edge of my bed, and read and read and read. It wasn’t a chore; she was the older child that could read, I was the smaller child that listened.

          Is it true that if you want to know how anyone thinks about things, you should know what his mother read to him? Over and over my mother read to me from two books, a big blue book of Bible stories − probably Hurlbut’s − and a big maroon book of stories of King Arthur and his court. We spent a lot of time in Galilee and Albion.

It is a sorrow, growing up, or pretending you have. It’s not a great sorrow, though. It’s like tiptoeing around after you’ve broken something you shouldn’t have been near much less picked up, hoping against hope that if you’re really quiet you won’t get caught. Mom was better at that than I have been. But no one gets away with a whole hell of a lot. Not where we live.

          That’s because our Bible, unlike Hurlbut’s, is fuller of Paul than of Jesus. The Messiah suggests we become like children if we want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like. The Apostle says, “Screw that: put away childish things. Stop thinking like a boy. Stop acting like a boy. Grow up!” Be a man, doing what men do.

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