“An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle.”
– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
My mother never learned to slow down. When she was young she raised her two younger sisters and took care of her mother. She married my father hoping to get away from her alcoholic father, but wound up taking care of an alcoholic husband and five kids instead. When her children grew and left the house she made busy work. She left on the TV to fill the empty space and at night she listened to talk radio in bed, never allowing silence. I used to judge her for her dependence on her children to make her happy. I felt smothered by her need for me to be nearby. I told my mother I didn’t need her help, that I was fine on my own, not knowing those words were translated into, “You don’t love me.”
When I was old enough to understand we all have a story behind our behaviors I asked my mother to tell me hers. She said she was never allowed to play as a child. There was too much work to be done and loafing was a sin according to her parents. Raising five kids she didn’t have the time to loaf. Living alone the ghosts of the past haunted her so she left on the TV and radio to drown out their voices. She wanted me to stay close so she could watch over me and always keep me safe.
If my mother was alive today there are so many things I’d do differently. I’d listen more, and talk less. I’d let her know I’d always need a mother’s gift of love. And I’d read her the Mary Oliver poem, The Summer Day, not at her eulogy like I did, but on a quiet Thursday afternoon when we were loafing around together:
…I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
