Only a Mother

There are two dates each year of particular significance for LDS missionaries: Mother’s Day, and Christmas day. It is on those days that the missionaries get to call home. The rest of the time they’re restricted to written communications. Now it’s email, but in my day, it was snail mail. There was no such thing as email (well, for the general public there wasn’t email. I understand Al Gore had been using it for years. And probably Josh Haley, but that’s just a suspicion.)

Of course, Christmas brought presents, too. On Christmas Day in 1992 I was doing my second stint in Lawton, Oklahoma. (I had actually started the mission in Lawton nearly two years before, so in mission-speak I was born there and I died there.) Shortly before Christmas I received a pretty large box in the mail that was filled with gifts. Unfortunately, the specifics of all but one of those gifts have long since faded from my memory. By that point in my mission I’d given up on any consistent journal writing, so I doubt there’s any kind of record anywhere, unless my mom kept an account book. But there was one gift that I still have today.

A blue sweatshirt with an ice-skating polar bear on the front.

I still have the sweatshirt--24 years later!

At that time I was serving as the zone leader and was the only one in the zone that had been out for over a year. My companion, Elder Scott Davis, was a brand new greenie, straight from the MTC, who had only been out a month. It was hard to believe for me that the mission was about to come to a close. It had been my life for two years. I had been serving as a missionary for 23 months and I was two weeks from turning 21.

What I wasn’t was 4. Which was good because the sweatshirt was (and still is) size XL. If I HAD been 4 it wouldn’t have fit it very well.

Quick, think of any 21 year old man you know. What do you think he wants for Christmas this year? If you guessed a blue sweatshirt with an ice-skating polar bear on the front, you’d be WRONG! 100% of the time, you’d be wrong.

And so it was that when I opened that gift, which was, incidentally, the “big” gift in my box, I was a little, in a word, dumbfounded.

Thanks Mom.

My mother is perhaps the craftiest person I know. I mean that in the best way possible. Like in the sense of doing and making crafts. Like they should rename “Michael’s” to “Kathy’s” crafty. My whole life before going on the mission, our house was decorated for the season. About midway through January, all of the Valentine’s day stuff came out. The house was red and pink. Most kids gave valentines to their friends. We gave iced sugar cookies with each kid’s name handwritten in frosting, carefully made by my mother.

No sooner did the Valentin’s decorations come down than the house was turned green. My mother was a Griffin by birth and the Irish blood came out. We didn’t have a river near our house, but the water coming out of the faucet was green.

Ok, that’s not true. But her beer was green.

That’s not true either. Sorry. Although she was Irish, she’d long since adopted her mother’s LDS faith so no drinking. But we DID have hand-crafted St Patrick’s day decorations all over the house. And shamrock-shaped sugar cookies with green icing and names scripted in frosting.

If you decorate for St. Paddy’s day, you certainly decorate for Easter. And your kids’ friends get sugar cookies in Easter Egg shapes with pastel frosting and their names scripted in frosting. You decorate for Independence Day. And Halloween. And Thanksgiving. It didn’t matter what the holiday, my mother had crafts that announced to the world that WE CELEBRATE [INSERT HOLIDAY NAME] IN THIS HOUSE!! And your kids’ friends get sugar cookies with their names hand-scripted in frosting. GEICO could make a commercial about my mother—it’s what you do.

But Christmas was the granddaddy of them all.  The tree was decorated with homemade decorations, including a personal favorite—soldiers and reindeer and Santas and nativity characters and all sorts of characters made from old wooden clothespins. She made stockings and advent calendars and table runners and tree skirts and more advent calendars and Christmas card holders and still more advent calendars. And they weren’t just for us—our cousins all got advent calendars and tree skirts and table runners from my mother, too. In fact, just last year Clorinda and the kids and I were visiting my cousins in Philadelphia and they were telling us about the advent calendar from Aunt Kathy (my mom) that she had sent them probably 35 years ago that was still in use in their home!

A fairly recent advent calendar.
I'm pretty sure all of my siblings have a matching one in their homes, too.
I'm not certain whether my cousins do.

Yep, while the rest of the world was fighting it’s way through mobs of people at all of the stores on Black Friday, our house was turning red, green, and white. My mom was crafting 12-Days-of-Christmas gifts for 4-6 different families, to be snuck out in the dark of night and delivered to unsuspecting recipients. And our friends got cookies with their names handwritten in frosting. And fudge. Oh, and peanut butter haystacks.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. My mom could cook really well (except for cream tuna on toast—that was nasty). And bake really well (except for that time she made a cake that called for mayonnaise and used Miracle Whip instead. Zing!).

And it wasn’t just holidays. My mom could do it all. She was my cub scout leader, coached my brother’s soccer team, was a “merry miss” leader back in the pre-activity-days days (I still don’t know my color season—my mom was adamant THAT was just for the girls, so it’s her fault if I wear clothes that aren’t in my color wheel), and seemed to have held just about every leadership position available in church.

So as it happened, there was some sort of ugly sweater contest in 1992 at my parents’ ward, and my mom decided that everyone needed matching blue sweatshirts with ice-skating polar bears on the front. So she made them for everyone in the family. That is no easy task in my family. There were 8 kids, at that time ranging from 21-minus-2-weeks (yours truly) to 3 (my sister Amy). Six of those eight were boys. Ten people. Who has time during December to whip out ten blue sweatshirts with ice-skating polar bears on the front?  But I guess if you’re already doing nine, the tenth one isn’t a big deal in that situation. Of COURSE if the 3 year old girl wants one, her 21 year old brother wants one! (She probably sent matching sweatshirts to Susan and Karen in Philadelphia, too. I’ll have to check next time I talk to them.)

My mother.

My mother is the first of two and the third of four, depending upon which of her parents you’re basing it on. She has one younger sister, and two older brothers that share a different dad. She grew up primarily in northern California, in the East Bay. When she was just fourteen, her own mother passed away from cancer, and my mom became the woman of the house. Eventually her dad remarried, which was a good thing for him but not so great for my mom. Having some understanding of the teenage daughter dynamic, I can see where bringing a new woman into the home probably isn’t going to turn out like the Sound of Music.

Well, maybe the part where they put a frog in her dress. But definitely not the part where they sing and dance through the mountains of Austria.

Let’s just say there was some friction between my mom and her step-mother.

But that didn’t stop her. In High School my mom’s family moved and my mother transferred to Castro Valley High School where: (i) she met my dad and (ii) she graduated top 5 (?) in her class. She lived in a different world from today. There wasn’t an expectation that most people would go to college, and that expectation was even lower for women. The draft was in full swing, and she and my dad were both expecting that he would soon be off to Vietnam. They had decided to get married and were even engaged (make sure to ask my dad about the night he asked his future father-in-law if he could marry my mom—let’s just say the words “terrified” and “vomit” may come up (pun not intended) in that story). But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and my dad was called to serve a mission for the LDS church. He went to Michigan. (It’s no Oklahoma, but I’ve been to East Lansing once and I just saw the inside of the Detroit airport last week—it seems nice enough.)

While my dad was in Michigan, my mom moved in with my other grandparents. As the end of my dad’s mission was approaching, they were still of a mind to get married when he returned. My mother took matters into her own hands. She got the announcements put together and sent out. Yes, my father received an invitation to his own wedding while he was still serving a mission in Michigan. That doesn’t happen every day (it certainly better not happen with Marien!). He returned home from his mission on March 2, 1972, and they were married 18 days later in the Oakland LDS Temple. Nine and one-half months later (drumroll please), yours truly arrived on the scene and life as we know it was forever changed.

My parents used to joke that they didn’t know how kids were made—maybe it came from eating Chinese food?—and that’s why they had so many. Well, the Chinese food was apparently plentiful in the Bay Area. They had four boys in their first five years and four months of marriage. Another boy was added 3 years later, but since he was destined to be THE middle child (just ask him), they added a girl, a boy, and another girl during the 80s. At one point my mother had 5 boys under the age of 8, and my dad was in the Bishopric, so she had to keep all of us in line by herself during church. WWE has got NOTHING on my mother.

Of course, my mother is not perfect. We still laugh thinking about when she was the Activity Chair in our ward in Hawaii and showed “Popeye” for a ward activity (“haul @$$, haul @$$!”). Or the time she stood in testimony meeting and told the ward that sometimes she wanted to ring their necks. Or the time she got really mad at Jay over something and actually tried to ring his neck. I’m not sure if Jay’s laughter was genuine or just an uncontrolled nervous terrified reaction.

But she is perfect in many ways. As a grandmother, she loves her 24 grandchildren perfectly and is always looking out for ways to serve them. For the last several years she has cared for my dad perfectly as he has been in and out of hospitals and surgeries and while he was effectively paralyzed from the neck down. (Note to self: insert joke about how he’s been paralyzed from the neck up most of his life.) I’m not sure she realized how strong of a person she was before all of that, but I’ve watched in amazement as she’s spent day after day and night after night in the hospital room or at PT or the doctor’s office. She has been the perfect wife for a serial entrepreneur. My dad gets new business ideas more than anyone I know (he’s like a poor man’s Elon Musk), and she has lived through years of feast-or-famine. But she always managed to make sure we were fed and clothed and had a roof over our heads.

There is a great verse in the Book of Mormon. It talks about a large group of young men who had gone off to war. They were very young, but were valiant and unafraid. When one of their leaders questioned their courage, he noted their response:

[A]s I had ever called them my sons (for they were all of them very young) even so they said unto me: Father, behold our God is with us, and he will not suffer that we should fall; then let us go forth; we would not slay our brethren if they would let us alone; therefore let us go, lest they should overpower the army of Antipus.
Now they never had fought, yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their lives; yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them.
And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it. (Alma 56:46-48.)

With my dad at her side, my mom raised 8 kids. I’m a little biased, but 7 of those 8 are among the best people I know (sorry Dave—maybe next year you’ll make the cut). I can’t speak for those 7, but I can speak for the other 1 (yeah, it wasn’t really you, Dave. You’re back on the list). So much of who I am and what I know and hold dear in my life I owe to my mother. Like the sons of scripture, I have relied countless times upon her example and testimony, and when I may have doubted my own testimony, never once did I doubt that my mother knew.

I remember one time my mom commented about how all she had ever wanted was to be a mom. So much of the world doesn’t see that as successful womanhood, but I am eternally grateful for a woman that dedicated her life to the noblest pursuit. Only a mother? Perhaps, but she is my mother. My angel mother.

Maybe that’s why I still have that sweatshirt.