Happy Birthday, Mommy
My mother had one calling in life - to be a mom. As an only child in her household I think my mom always dreamed of filling up a home with babies. And boy did she. Four kids. Three boys and one girl, one right after the other like little stair steps. She LOVED babies. Babies were her jam.
Once we started walking and talking back? She had to lean into her calling.
This month we're going to dissect what it means to live a life of complicated purpose. We'll even dive into the deep end of the pool and talk about our "calling". But on her birthday, I want to pay homage to a woman who pursued her calling to the bitter end even though the reality of it often startled her. She persevered.
Living a life of purpose is a mantra these days. We're encouraged to follow our bliss (Joseph Campbell). But what happens when our calling does not match our expectations of bliss? Do we search for meaning elsewhere or abandon the work that feels too hard to be sacred? My mother did not expect children to be so...dirty, messy, and expensive. She did not expect any of her children to end up addicted to alcohol and drugs. She did not expect her kids to end up having a...complicated...relationship with their father, her husband. She never in her wildest dreams wanted to live apart from her own parents or her kids. She expected a nice, neat, orderly, quiet life in Durham, NC within a few miles of her parents. What she ended up with was life in South Dakota, North Carolina (Durham, Charlotte), Georgia (Atlanta three times), Virginia (Virginia Beach, Richmond and Roanoke), Memphis, Tennessee (for such a short time she didn't even actually move there), Chicago, Illinois and New Jersey (two different locations).
Life was not what she expected but she soldiered on. When I got the call that my mom was in crisis after being given medicine that caused her to bleed internally, I left my own calling as a mother who was waiting for my own daughter to give birth and headed south to Atlanta. It took me 9 hours to reach her and it was 1 am when my GPS system guided me into the parking lot of the hospice facility where she had been taken. She was asleep and so I quietly settled in to watching her breathe.
Early the next morning she awoke, startled to be in this strange place. I reassured her. She asked me, "Have I been a good mother?" I was able to answer with all honesty, "You have been the best mother I could ever have hoped for." In her last days, my mom was afraid she had somehow failed as a mom. Was she reliving her sacred calling in her last days? Had someone hinted that she had not fulfilled her role? I will never know, but I know this: she did her absolute best at "momming".
Dr. William Willimon, who I will be talking about a lot in the coming days, expressed a sentiment about calling. He says that "calling" is not glamorous. When we live out our calling, it does not necessarily make our lives better but it does allow other people's lives to be enriched. If that's what it means to live a life of purpose, my mom was an all-star.
