Treasures in My Mother’s Bible

My mother’s Bible

Inscribed by her mother, December 25, 1951

When I was cleaning out my parents’ house after my father’s death in January 2015, one of the things I sent to my home was my mother’s Bible. Her mother gave it to her for Christmas 1951, during my future mother’s senior year of high school. It is the Bible in which Mother recorded her marriage, the births of all her children, her children’s marriages, and her six grandchildren’s births—a half-century of important events in her life from 1955 through 2005.

She recorded her marriage to my father

When I put the Bible in the box to ship, I noticed some papers in the front. But in the rush to sort through a houseful of belongings in a few days, I didn’t spend any time reading them. Then sometime during the summer of 2016, about a year and a half after the Bible wended its way to my house, I paused while cleaning out my office to examine the papers.

There in the Bible was the sonnet I wrote my mother for her birthday on March 4, 1974, when I was a freshman in college. I gave the sonnet to her along with the owl needlepoint I’d done that winter—my first needlepoint project ever.

The sonnet has a history. During the year or two prior to March 1974, I had written a number of poems to family members and friends—a poem to one brother on his sixteenth birthday, another to my other brother on his sixth birthday, a poem to a friend on her nineteenth birthday. I liked the discipline of writing rhymed poetry, and it seemed more personal than giving a preprinted greeting card.

My sonnet to my mother, March 4, 1974

At some point Mother hinted that it would be nice if I wrote her a poem, too. I didn’t respond to her hints. I was not moved to write my mother a poem—I was going through a stage in which I didn’t respect my mother, because it seemed to me that she had given up her life and ambition, martyred herself (often unhappily) to cater to her husband and children. I did not want a life like that for myself.

The owl needlepoint I gave to my mother with the sonnet. It now hangs next to my writing desk.

Nevertheless, I cynically did write a poem for her birthday on March 4, 1974. I say “cynically” because I can remember how I felt as I wrote it. I kept my emotional distance as I crafted the rhyme scheme. I described her life as I saw it, then referred to the needlepoint I was giving her. I didn’t feel good about the poem, because the syrupy words I used didn’t represent an ideal to me. The sonnet felt contrived, like I was reaching for feelings I should have, but didn’t.

Now, thirty-eight years later, though I see flaws in the poetry, my words bring tears to my eyes. I am now able to sympathize more with why my mother lived as she did. I made different choices than she did, but I now know she did what she thought was right and she did the best she could.

Here is my poem:

To Mother

A mother’s hands are busy day and night;
They help the child when he’s too small to know.
Without their care the baby could not grow,
Yet in his innocence he deems it right
That mother’s hands are to fulfill his needs.
He is not satisfied; he still demands
More labor from her e’er untiring hands
And thanks them not for any of their deeds.

Since I’ve been gone these months, I’ve come to know
How much your hands did do when I was small
To keep us happy, yet you ne’er complained.
My hands now make a gift for you to show
My love and gratitude when I recall
The happy home that you have e’er maintained.

Happy birthday, Mother
Love, Theresa 3/4/74

But the sonnet was not all I found.

The birthday card I sent my mother, March 4, 2013

Also in my mother’s Bible was the birthday card I sent her in March 2013, just a couple of months after she moved into assisted living because of the progression of her dementia. She didn’t handle phone calls well by that time, and it was hard to converse with her. The card was the best attempt I could make to recognize her birthday, but I wasn’t sure what meaning she would place on the card—if any. Would it remind her of better times she had lost and make her sad? Or would she see it as me condescending to her—it was a Winnie the Pooh card, whimsical and childish, but recalling a book she had always loved? Would she even know who it was from?

I don’t know how she reacted to the card. But she—or my father—put it in the Bible that she had with her in her room in the assisted living facility.

The card and the poem, written almost forty years apart, capture two points out of countless points in the complicated relationship between my mother and me. Two points that came together in that room in 2013, and that came together again for me as I went through the Bible in 2016.

Yesterday, March 4, 2018, would have been my mother’s 85th birthday. It seems appropriate to acknowledge my arrogance and narrow-mindedness back in 1974. I discounted my mother’s life often through the years, but I do so far less frequently now that she is gone. I’m now twenty years older than Mother was in 1974, and I hope I’ve gained some wisdom in those years.

What gifts from you did your parents keep, and what do they mean to you now?