December is a hard month for me historically.
This year my mom is in a memory care facility in California and the hardness has intensified. I should’ve known it would. I am thankful she is in a good place where she is happy and peaceful. Her eyes are no longer full of worry and fright like they once were and that is the best thing God could gift us. Her days are easy right now and she’s having fun.
The rest of us are left to see what she cannot and feel what she cannot and remember the things she cannot. I am my mother’s only daughter. Daughters are the keepers of all the things when it comes to mothers or maybe that’s just a story we tell ourselves. Or perhaps that’s a story I tell myself. Truth is none of us can keep anything for anyone else so I start mortar and bricking, mortar and bricking, mortar and bricking around me.
Then I slap a string of flashing white Christmas lights on top of my barricade like a prisoner in a tuxedo tshirt. Here to suffer, but still know how to party.
Margaret Henson Brummel with a dead dad by five yeras old and a sickly single mom in the 1950s before there were many single moms raising two kids on a teacher’s salary. Sharing a room with her mom til she moved out and married my dad. Margaret Henson Brummel who, by shear force of will, willed herself to live all the days as hard as she could, out-living most of us times ten in the effort and zeal, saving the world, doing all the things, never showing weakness, going to. all the home games, always inviting the stranger, answering calls to serve even when one might think she had run out of hours to serve, hosting, learning, talking, laughing, running, talking on the phone, cursing the Republicans, praying to Jesus, maybe crying twice. Ever.
You know who can bear up under the heaviest sadness? Margaret Henson Brummel. Do you know who will never shut the door, never stop trying, never run out of mercy long after the rest of us? Margaret Henson Brummel. As a kid, I saw the sad things. I knew the trouble. The trouble and sadness rubbed off on me. As a grown up, years later, I see the other tragedies I never saw before that never touched me much but did their best to topple Margaret.
Margaret Henson Brummel’s mom was Margaret Risvold Henson. She learned how to bear up under sadness from the best of them. Margaret Risvold Henson got scarlet fever as a child and was never the same again. Weak heart, weak constitution. During the depression she had two dresses. Wear one, then the other and switch. The only teaching job she could get during the depression, was as a tutor at a children's hospital where mom told me the story about her teaching her students and then they’d die and then she’d tutor another student and they’d die. Then she got married to an older alcoholic who took her out to California where they had two small children and then he died and there she was, weak-hearted and alone with two kids. Her mom and dad came to live with her. Her mom got hit by a drunk driver and died. Her alcoholic dad took her room, she bunked in with her 5 year old daughter and put one foot in front of another year after before dying in her 60s alone in her house where her son had to climb through the window to find her. She taught elementary school in Compton her whole career where she kept it from her Mississippi relations that there were children of all colors in her classroom begging the question, for goodness sake, how many secrets must one heart keep?
Why am I telling you all this? Same question. How many secrets must one heart keep?
it’s no secret that my Decembers are sad events. It’s no secret that mortar and brick, even though I know they won’t do a damn thing for me, are close at hand so I never get too close to anything or anyone. Hurt too much? Mortar and brick, mortar and brick, higher and higher and then maybe I’ll survive.
I do what Margaret Henson Brummel does. I try and save the world and work my way to Jesus. Will I get to go to heaven if I help at church enough? Will I make up for all my mistakes and sins if I show Jesus my mortar and brick barricade? Can I make good impressions on strangers to make up for the fact that deep relationships are terrifying? Can I get Alzheimer’s now and not wait 20 years so I can refuse all the drugs and pay penance for my existance mortar and brick, mortar and brick, mortar and brick?
Mom and Dad were married for ten years and had adopted two sons when Mom got pregnant for the first time with me. Some people live in the ‘miracle baby’ narrative after something like that. No one ever talked like that about me (and then four years later my brother), but ten years of infertility is significant. A pregnancy after ten years is out of the ordinary. And they named me, “Hope.” And, I shit you not, it never occured to me that my name was a message. I don’t recall anyone ever saying it was. I recall a funny conversation about name choices between my parents and my dad coming up with goofy possibilities to make my mom laugh. I remember my brothers teasing me about what ‘Hopie” means in Dutch. No miraculous narrative on that front.
However, now, in this season of miraculous birth, in the darkness of December, in the darkness of my own spirit there’s this one word spoken back to me about mourning turned to dancing over and over again. It can go unidentified for days, weeks, months years, but it’s always there. A message from my mom now that she can’t speak to me anymore. Probably a word she thought about and loved but was too busy to tell me about it. A word we all could welcome in to even at the hardest parts of an old story. Sometimes you want to mortar and brick yourself into a place where the hurt can’t get you. Sometimes you want to mortar and brick yourself in for fear that the love may overwhelm you. Sometimes an ordinary word in the tiniest of moments turn it all around. Thanks, Mom.
Peace to you.