Day 361 - Reflections on Mom's Autobiography

Mom at about 27

Since most of these pieces have been more autobiographical than literary, I thought I would end this project with some in that vein that I wrote before, but that needed editing.

While I was in Yemen, Mom completed an autobiography course through church. She shared the five assignments with us kids with the hope that we would also complete the same assignments. While I always intended to, I didn't complete them before it was too late for Mom to read mine. Instead, I chose to respond to Mom's assignments.

The first assignment was to describe life's most significant branching points. Mom began that assignment with these two paragraphs:

I like to think of my life as a tree. I love trees. I am sure my children got bored with my pointing out, as we traveled, that great oak, all by itself, standing so proud. Or that line of trees that were bent permanently from the wind.

Sometimes our lives show us to be straight and proud or at other times we are bowed down by trials, and tears.

I am an integrator. I don't always remember the details, but I know that I have integrated important impressions in such a way that they are now part of me, not a series of isolated memories or even in my conscious memory at all.

I don't remember Mom pointing out trees when I was a child. But I do know that I love trees, too. When I drove down the highways of Romania, I was struck by the arrangement of trees along both sides of all the roads. The bottoms of the trunks were always painted white. John used to insist that the prisoners had responsibility for painting the trees, to keep the rabbits from eating the bark.

I remember being in the park at the shore of Big Detroit Lake when I discovered how complex the patterns of the bark on the trees can be. I stared at the bark so long that my eyes started playing tricks -- it almost seemed that the bark was melting down the tree, like candle wax.

I love to look at the outline of the bare tree branches at dusk in the winter along Interstate 94 between Moorhead and Minneapolis. Those scenes always remind me of Charles Beck paintings. The landscape may be unimaginably boring in its flatness to Alex and others who did not grow up in our area, but the view of the finely woven netting of the tree limbs springing from trunks, evenly spaced and regimented in rows along the edges of fields, is enough to break up the monotony for me.

Mom's assignment continued:

The incident that affected my life dramatically happened when I was 27 years old. I was a mother of two children, Sandra age 5 and Wayne age 2. One evening, the children were in bed and their Dad was at work at the Power Plant, I was doing a correspondence Bible Study Lesson from Lutheran Bible Institute. You got each lesson, filled it out, sent it back, and it would be returned with comments and usually a word of encouragement.

The lesson was on Acts 9, the story of Saul on the road to Damascus. When I studied this story, I too, felt as if a "light bulb" went on in my head. I knew, then, that Jesus died "for me!" I felt like singing, I felt free! My life has never been the same since then. I did not instantly become a perfect person. I am still a sinner, I still found myself "grumpy" with the children when I was tired. Gradually I saw where my actions had to change, in order to be a loving wife and parent, a friend to my neighbors, as Jesus would be.

Since I was five when Mom completed the Lutheran Bible Institute lesson based on Acts 9, I may have some early memories of the Mom before Acts 9 as well as the Mom after Acts 9. But I don't have any memories of a time when I didn't think Mom had more self-confidence than the mothers of most of my friends. And I think it rubbed off. I don't think I ever thought there was something I couldn't do. I always got encouragement from both Mom and Dad to try whatever I wanted to do, whether it was to play the violin or go to camp. I never saw Mom or Dad try something that they couldn't do, or that they seemed unable to complete. As a result, it never occurred to me that I couldn't do something that an adult told me to do -- whether it was an assignment from a teacher or a task from a supervisor at work. I always figured the adult knew better than I.

Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad.