Do you hear what I hear?

"The first duty of love is to listen."



The pastor this morning used this quote to open his sermon on the sense of hearing in our relationship with God. The quote struck me this morning in how Mom reflected God's love to me throughout my life.



When I heard the quote this morning, it resonated throughout me. First, as a reminder to me that God is always listening, and always understands, even better than we do and are able to communicate. Then, it struck me that this also was Mom's gift - her personal brilliance in parenting. She wasn't perfect, by any means. I don't wish to fall into the trap of idolizing the dead, flattening them into a dreary character of all black and white. But Mom had love for us (and for so many others in her life), and she showed it by listening.


I have always admired my Mom as a parent. Even as a preteen, I longed for the day when I could become a mom myself, because of two main reasons. First, I felt both Mom and Dad were good parents and would be even better grandparents, and I was anxious to get to share that experience with them. Second, I was eager to enact myself the lessons in mothering that I had lived each day with my own mom.






(Mom making Easter Eggs with Maggie, 2007)


So, of course, with these motivations so strongly involved as I went into parenting, I feel it all the more keenly when I see myself falling short of what I have learned from Mom. I find that I have two main struggles: Attention and Patience.

I live in a cluttered mind. My attention is so often inward, where there are stories and scripts always running - both looking forward and into the future. Jeremy and I joke about it as we once heard this perfectly described as having "an active inner life." I am generally comfortable in this - it is who I am. Jeremy has gotten used to the fact that I might be miles away even when I appear fully present. (It was the effects of this personality trait that led me to bow out of serving with our church's preschoolers - I found I could contentedly watch a 2-year-old unwind an entire cassette tape, one finger turn at a time - and never really process that I should intervene.) Yet, of course, much more significantly, it can interfere with my ability to really listen to the people I am with. One place I feel this shortcoming is in my parenting.

I also am a bit of a hothead. I guess the most classic example of this is from my college days. As a senior, I should have developed enough self-control to at least pretend to be polite to my professors. But I had one particularly irritating instructor, at least in my mind. It wasn't just the fact that I felt that he wasn't helping us in the ways I was sure we students we deserved; it was that he seemed to know that and take gleeful pride in it - some sort of smug superiority that he knew the better way to teach us for our own good. So I can still shamefully recall, more than 15 years later, how I one day shouted at him in class, "And where did that number come from? Did you just pull it out of your butt?"

So, this feistiness serves well in some contexts, actually. I can be the one to say that the emperor has no clothes. But parenting does not seem to be one of these beneficial contexts. How often I find myself being impatient (and unkind) with my children. I can snap and yell all day long, alternating with remorseful over-kindness. I sometimes feel like the classic abusive spouse, storming and raging and then trying to make up for it the next day with a shower of presents and affection. Oh, how I have wrestled with myself and with God to forgive me and to grant me greater patience for the next day.

Mom, on the other hand, seemed to be made of patience. She must have gotten angry - she was human, after all. But I recall only a few instances of her anger showing, and those times stand out to me as being almost comical, as if a rabbit suddenly decided to rage ineffectually against a wolf. Rather, Mom greeted most things with a deep breath, a long pause, a slow chewing on her bottom lip. And then, she got to work. She started solving things. Because that was what she did.

But how did she know the right solutions? Well, as it hit me this morning in church, I think she so often knew because, out of love, she listened. She listened well, and she listened all the time.

As the Bible exhorts, she was quick to listen and slow to speak (James 1:19). Thus, I have no memories of her yelling in the way that I so often snap at my own children. She was busy listening to us instead. If my kids are slow to carry out my instructions, I yell. Mom listened, and figured out what was distracting us, and gently removed that first. If my kids disappoint me with their whining or selfishness or thoughtlessness, I yell. Mom listened, and heard that we needed a nap, or food, or a hug after a difficult day. If my kids express angst about the world and how it works, I struggle with wanting to jump in and take away the hurt by just erasing it. Mom listened, and just let us be sad for a while before the inevitable problem-solving session began.

I recall Mom listening this way with my own child, James. He is a child who feels things deeply. Even at five, he was given to bouts of despair over a situation. Unfortunately, at five, he wasn't always able to articulate exactly what it was that was upsetting him. (For that matter, how many adults are able to do this?) He was one night in a self-pitying funk that quickly dissolved into tears, shouting, a declaration of "I wish I didn't live in this family," and a retreat to his bed. I was feeling fed up with the tantrums and quite happy to leave him to his own medicine. Luckily for James, Mom was staying with us that night. She quietly went in and just rubbed his back. When he was calmer, she started asking him questions. And she just let him talk. And perhaps most importantly, she took his answers seriously. I wish I had saved the piece of paper she wrote on that night. As she listened to James, she wrote for him in two lists - "Reasons why I should leave this family," and "Reasons why I should stay." (Grandma Di's cooking as a reason to stay is actually the only item I still recall. That still makes me smile.) Mom later handed me the list as if she were giving me the Rosetta Stone to James. I know at the time, I pooh-poohed it. James was in a funk. Kids do that. He would get over it. But perhaps Mom, better than I, understood the truism expressed by author Orson Scott Card in his introduction to the novel, Ender's Game. (Card had been criticized for writing about a young boy using the voice of an adult. Card responded that this had been deliberate: as he thought back over his life, he could not remember a single moment when he felt anything less than a full human being, with less than full needs and wants and emotions. A child's thoughts and emotions are not child-sized to the child.) So Mom really listened to James, then took him seriously enough to write down what she heard to try to pass it along to those who could effect change for him. We didn't ever hear from James again about wanting to leave the family, and we never discussed it again. Perhaps knowing that someone, in this case his Grandma Jean, had really heard him was all he needed.

(Mom reading to James, 2003 )





I have one beautiful adult memory of Mom's listening to me. Some months after losing my first pregnancy, I recall Mom saying some things that hit me as cruel. She just didn't seem to get it, how I was feeling. For a while, I held my tongue and simmered, feeling wretched that even my own mother couldn't seem to empathize with me. One day, I finally tried to explain to her, tearfully, one small piece of my pain. I explained how it was hard for me that the world had moved on before me - I had faced the due date of my baby and besides Jeremy, nobody else cared, or even knew. Now, I don't think I was very gentle with Mom. It has never been my style, after all. (Remember how kind I was to the irritating professor?) But she didn't respond in anger.

Rather, Mom, as usual, was slow to speak and quick to listen. I remember her simply apologizing to me that day that she hadn't understood. But it was months later when she proved her apology to me. I knew that she really had been listening, when the anniversary of the due date of my first child again arrived, along with a card from Mom. She remembered. And she remembered every year after that - with a card, a small gift, something. Even after my heart had healed enough to move on, to not face that day with dread each year, I still could count on Mom remembering.

Mom is two years gone now, and my heart feels as if it will never heal from this blow. For when she was on the earth with us, Mom demonstrated her love to me through attention and patience, which allowed her to truly listen.