Switchboards, Lupus, Moving Steps and Wall-Eyed Baboons.

I write these words on the day before Mothers Day.  On the one hand Mother's Day is day of joy and celebration.  Yet, if we are totally honest Mothers Day often amplifies the tragic circumstances of family life that haunt many persons.  So while we celebrate and venerate our mothers let us not forget those for whom the day is painful.

Those acknowledgements made, I cannot deny the powerful impact mothers have had on my life, beginning with my own.  Life was not always easy for my mother.  She was born in the twenties and raised in the teeth of the Depression.  A world war came and she met her life's love, a strapping young sailor who was home on leave after the end of the war.   

They married and a little over a year later, she gave birth to their first child while he was in the South Pacific with the occupation forces cleaning up some of the mess the war had made.  

She had begun working for Southern Bell.  Believe it or not in those days one could not directly call another person.  One lifted the phone and reached an operator at the phone company headquarters who then connected one to the party they were trying to reach by plugging a cord into the appropriate hole in something called a switchboard.  My mother's first job was being one of the operators plugging the cords into the holes. 

Time marched on.  When his naval time ended, my father came home.  Mother continued her work at Southern Bell and my dad, though out of the military, took a job at Robins Air Force Base.  The decade of the fifties were a little crowded in the house.  My grandmother and mother's brother lived with my mom and dad and their daughter born on the leading edge of the baby boom.

By the sixties a new home had been purchased. My mother's brother had moved on, joining the Marine Corps.  As the baby boom drew to a close a new baby boomed into the family.  They gave me my father's name and tacked the word junior on the end of it.

My sister left for college four years later.  It wasn't long after that,  mother's  health began to decline.  She developed painful issues with her back.  In the late sixties she had surgery that is fairly common today called spinal fusion.  However, in the sixties the surgery was primitive at best.  

After the surgery, she was required to lay on her back for six weeks.  Then she had to wear a heavy brace that resembled a cage for many more weeks and followed that with a corset like brace for a number of weeks after that. After a year of recovery, she tried to return to work but it was not to be.  She had to retire from the work force.

There were a few years of passable health for her that followed but by the mid-seventies it was clear something was amiss. Breathing became difficult, her joints began to ache.  There were trips to specialists. There was even a trip to the Duke University Hospital in North  Carolina to consult with some sort of pulmonologist that was the creme de la creme of pulmonologists. 

Rheumatoid arthritis was the diagnosis for her joints and she was able to get some relief but the breathing still remained a mystery.  Finally a doctor at Emory made the deduction that not only did she have the arthritic condition she also had lupus.

Lupus is a disease of the immune system in which the body tells itself it is sick when it isn't.  Yet. the body produces anti-bodies and sets out to attack an illness that doesn't exist.  The result is the body is attacking itself.  Sometimes lupus attacks specific organs, in my mother's case it was her lungs and joints.

She fought. I don't know that she ever had a day in which she felt good.  Yet, she fought.  The doctor at Emory didn't give her much hope for longevity; however, mother outlived him.  In fact. she lived twenty eight more years after the diagnosis passing away a few months shy of her eighty-second birthday.  Incidentally, she did not die  as a result of lupus but rather she died from injuries sustained when she fell getting out of a chair and landed head first on the floor.  So I suppose the final score was Mother 28 Lupus 0. 

During those twenty-eight years, she buried her mother and her husband.  Even, the church she had faithfully attended and served had closed by the time she passed away. 

Yet, this is just the background of the story.  The true story of my mother was her faith.  If you asked my mother who she was she would never say "I'm a lupus victim."  She would not say, "I'm retired from Southern Bell."  She would not even say, "I'm a wife"  or I'm a mother " or "I'm a widow."  She would tell you that she was a "Child of God."

She never let herself be defined by her illness, her vocation or her family.  Rather, she defined herself by her faith in Jesus Christ.  

Mother's life exhibited her faith.  She taught sixth graders in Sunday School for a number of years. One did not "graduate" from her class without being able to recite the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Apostles' Creed and John Wesley's shoe size. 

Through those doors came future attorneys, entrepreneurs, engineers, bankers, teachers and at least three United Methodist Ministers. There was also a convicted felon or two but even they all knew the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-Third Psalm, the Apostle's Creed and John Wesley's shoe size.

When she perceived that her church needed a Sunday School class for young adults, she left the sixth graders behind and started a class for the young adults.  She and my father taught the class for a number of years until the class developed its own leadership.

I have a number of Bible's she owned all with notes in the margin.  She was generous. She was also unpretentious.

There is one story from my mother's life that exemplifies who she was.  An African-American woman by the name of Josey cleaned for us once a week.  Josey was a very wise woman  even though she could not read.  She never cleaned our home without offering some pearl of wisdom.

A new shopping mall opened in our home town of Macon and one day as Josey had finished cleaning mother asked if she wanted to go see the new mall.  Josey said yes, so my mother and  Josey headed to the new mall.

The mall was two levels and mother asked Josey if she wanted to go upstairs on the glass elevator or use the escalator.  Josey said, "I want to ride those steps that are moving."

As mother and Josey emerged from the "moving steps" they encountered some  family friends. Mother greeted them.  She then introduced them to Josey saying, "This is my friend, Josey."  Mother didn't say this is our housekeeper Josey, our cleaning lady Josey, our maid Josey. She said "This is my friend, Josey."  

This was in Middle Georgia in the early seventies, when race relations were far worse than they are today.  Yet, in one fell swoop mother pushed aside barriers of race and of class and introduced her friend Josey.

Mother was comfortable with her friend Josey as she was with other friends who may have been more notable or more prominent.  

No mention of her would be complete without mentioning her vocabulary.  Sometimes mother's words could be taken as offensive but that wasn't how they were meant.  If she called one an "old heifer" she really wasn't saying one was a female cow.  Rather she was expressing endearment. as in "I love you, you ole heifer."

The term "wall-eyed baboon" was her substitute for "you rascal."  I often was called a "wall-eyed baboon" in spite of the fact that no one I know has ever seen a "wall eyed baboon" or even knows how a "wall-eyed baboon," might look.

 

I must say that there were times that we both irritated each other and were frustrated with the other.  That's just the way relationships are.  I didn't like every decision she ever made and she certainly didn't like every decision I ever made.  

Yet, in the end, there is one thing I learned most of all from her.  It isn't real easy to explain but I will try.  As I've said mother had very few if any days over the second half of her life that saw her without pain.  Yet, she never gave in.

There are days, particularly as I've gotten a little older, in which I wake up in the morning and something hurts.  It might be a knee, my stomach, a shoulder or a foot.  Some days I'm just in a bad mood not from anything physical but from some work issue or personal issue.  However, on what are bad days for me I hear mother's voice saying "this would have been a good day for me." 

In other words she taught me that feeling sorry for myself was no way to go through life.   She was the living embodiment of what  Paul wrote in Philippians:

"Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you." (Philippians 4:8-9  NRSV)

"Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me."  I will try to do those things I have learned, received, heard and seen from my mother.  Of course, it will be very hard for an ole "wall-eyed baboon" like me.