Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505130001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Watching my wife interact with our two daughters is a daily education in parent-child relations. Some days they are buddies who understand all about each other. Other days they are obviously alien creatures who cannot possibly share genetic material.
We adults look at our own mothers with a mixture of devotion and confusion and love - in part, perhaps, because many of us have shared that hot and cold relationship.
We sometimes feel guilty, too, about how we didn't appreciate our mothers when they were calling us in to supper as kids or how we don't visit often enough as adults. Guilt explains a lot of today's phone calls and flowers.
But I think more of them are explained by the awe we feel at how wise and loving our mothers were and are.
In an era before there were public kindergartens in my hometown, Mom was my only kindergarten teacher. At the time, the 1950s, she was, like the majority of women her age, a homemaker whose biggest job was raising two children.
It was from her that my brother and I heard those lessons Robert Fulghum talked about learning in kindergarten - sharing, holding hands, singing and listening. And I learned how to write my name and add two plus two.
Today, my wife teaches kindergarten in a public school. In class, she not only is expected to teach children how to play nicely together and read the letters of the alphabet and count numbers, but in all too many cases she is expected to instill the most basic values that parents have neglected to teach - values such as respect and honesty and hard work.
While she's a wonderful surrogate mother for those kids, that's an unfair expectation of her and it's not the same as if those children's real mothers were passing on those lessons.
Fortunately, however, most of us - and most of today's children - get those important morality lessons from our parents. Especially, it seems, from our mothers.
I'm so thankful for the multitude of lessons my mother taught me, especially those that have helped me be a better father for my daughters.
In an incredible act of foresight, Mom was preparing me for a future in which women - including my own daughters - would be demanding the equal treatment they deserve.
Some of those lessons:
- No man is smarter than a woman just because he's a man. The notion that men were inherently smarter than women was even more prevalent then than now. Mom knew better and made sure her children - both boys - knew better, too. She went on to earn a bachelor's, master's and doctorate after her sons were grown.
- The black man from my father's office who sometimes visited our home on business was always to be treated with the same respect as white adults. "Yes, sir" or "No, sir" were required.
The word "nigger" was forbidden at all times in our household. No act of Congress was needed to teach me that racism - institutional or personal - was wrong.
- Whenever my parents visited with adult friends or relatives we children were never excluded from meals or conversation. We were expected to be polite, to refrain from interrupting. But we were accorded the privilege of listening to adult conversation - and allowed to join in if we had something thoughtful to add.
Mom may have learned some of that respect for children from her father. When he was 70 and I was 8, he sat and listened patiently and appreciatively as I explained the wonders of the solar system, fresh from the pages of the new World Book Encyclopedia. He reacted, not condescendingly, but as if I were revealing secrets of the universe he'd never even imagined.
Respecting the thoughts and words of a child can be a challenge, but I cannot think of any better way to teach them to respect others' thoughts and opinions.
- Building self-esteem in children is no easy task. As children, we face all kinds of challenges to our view of ourselves - there are smarter people, bigger people, stronger people all around. For most of us, I think, our mothers are the ones who shoulder the greatest responsibility for helping us understand and deal with that.
Mom always knew how to make me feel I was smart and good, while at the same time appreciating the talents of others without feeling threatened or intimidated by them.
- Finally, but crucially, Mom was the one who taught me that God loves me no matter what, and proved it to me by loving me herself - no matter what.
She took me to church most Sundays, but it wasn't the preaching that led me to God. It was the example she and my father set.
All parents, I think, worry that we're not doing a very good job at our most important vocation - rearing our children. We fret that our mistakes sabotage our good intentions, that we haven't done enough to protect our children from evil and hurt, that we should have done more to make them happy and secure and good.
It's encouraging to think that most of us want to honor our own parents for the job they did rearing us, even though they had the same fears of inadequacy that we do.
So, thanks Mom, for all the things you gave me. I can only try to pay you back by doing the best job I can with your granddaughters, to pass on the gifts of life and love you gave me.
by CNB