ALAN writes:

A million tomorrows shall all pass away, Ere I forget all the joy that is mine today.

More than twenty thousand tomorrows have now faded away since I first heard the lovely song with those words in 1964. But I have not forgotten all the joy that was mine in years long ago — because my mother made it possible.

Which is not to say that those years were filled only with joy. Far from it.

When I was a boy, my mother gave me everything a boy could hope for, and those were years of countless joys.  But there was one thing she didn’t give me, because she couldn’t. That was paternal authority. She tried her best to provide something equivalent, but it was ersatz authority and largely ineffectual.  She gave me chores to do around the house, but they were pseudo-responsibilities, not real responsibilities like those that she and her brother learned by necessity in their childhood home in the 1920s-’30s.  Checks and balances were generally in place in my boyhood home, but were not always enforced as firmly and consistently as they might have been.

The problem with my childhood was not that it was too hard but that it was too easy.

In an age of material comforts, the concretes of everyday life were too many or too vivid to permit me at that age to understand how hard my mother worked to create that comfortable life for her son. There were too few constraints placed upon me by which I may have developed a better appreciation for those things, as well as for her and other parents in her generation. My mother made errors on the side of generosity, likely without ever realizing she was doing so.  The result was a terrible imbalance: Too much generosity on her part was met by too little gratitude on my part — and worse: By too little awareness of why such gratitude was imperative.

She and I never talked about such things; we merely (!) lived through them, with great difficulty at times. Decades went by before I managed to place all of that in proper perspective.

The absence of paternal authority — resulting from her decision to separate from my father — was disastrous. It meant that she would have three jobs: Homemaker and housekeeper, seamstress in the workaday world, and mother to a teenage boy at a time when he would flirt with rebelliousness. She did the first two jobs remarkably well, but the third was too much for her. She provided plenty of love and security. But she could not provide strict enforcement of rules and responsibilities.  Only my father could have done that — and he would have, had she not consigned him to the outer perimeter.

She and I became entrenched in a conflict in 1966 that would have consequences for years afterward.  Without ever intending it, she and I became contestants in a battle of wills.  There was no third voice in our home who might have mediated that conflict.

In effect, my mother and I provided a case in point for the question, “Does a child need both a mother and a father in his life?”  Laura Wood said the answer is Yes.  Not only was she right; truer words could not be written.  [“The Yin and Yang of Childhood”, The Thinking Housewife, June 28, 2009]

In March 1998, I read and clipped a short AP news article from Peoria, Illinois. The headline read: “Woman says she found husband dead after he had lain for a day on couch”. She blamed herself for neglecting to check on him and “told police that she and her husband had a living arrangement and had rarely spoken over the past decade”.

I clipped and saved that article not because it was terribly sad to read and think about, although it was. I clipped it because: It was my mother and her son. It was the emotional equivalent of that “living arrangement” by which my mother and I lived in the same house but rarely spoke to each other, while years went by.

Only long afterward was I able to look back and evaluate those years.  The one consolation to me was that my mother was not a philosopher, that she was not inclined to think at length about such matters (as I was and am), and that she had her brothers and sisters and cousins and friends to offer her their moral support, which they did and for which I was eternally thankful.  Only then did I realize that such “living arrangements” are not uncommon and are often inevitable.  Only then did I realize that such conflicts and silences and “living arrangements” are consequences of too little education in a proper code of morality or too much in a wrong code.

Nor was our conflict mitigated by the fact that my mother accepted extremely bad advice from shyster-doctors.  They told her our conflict was a result of medical defects “in” her son that they would fix for her — for a handsome fee — and she believed every word of it.  The truth, of course, was entirely different:  Our conflict had nothing to do with medicine or defects; it had everything to do with morality and moral agency.  The only possible solution to our conflict was moral/metaphysical, not medical/technical/scientific.

But my mother was like many other bedrock-decent-and-honest but medicine-worshipping Americans: She was inclined to believe whatever doctors told her.  That they could be stupid or would lie was inconceivable to her.

In all innocence, she accepted their lies as valid, a choice which in turn caused my anger and resentment to intensify from red-hot to white-hot.  Those “experts” made the situation much worse.  Such was the “help” that fellow Catholics in our extended family encouraged her to accept from shyster-doctors.

That modern parents think it is reasonable to seek advice from any “doctor” or “scientist” in the matter of ordinary family disputes is itself a hallmark of an age of pretentious fakery and evasion.  Disagreements between parents and children are as old as history and as unavoidable as rain.  Resolving them requires moral courage, wisdom, and determination.  Neither science nor medicine has any role in such affairs.  On the contrary:  Self-serving “advice” from “doctors” or “scientists” will make matters much worse.

None of that reduces in the least the huge moral debt that I owed to my mother for all the joys that she made possible for her son in the years before that conflict.

Like 1950s television’s June Cleaver, Margaret Anderson, and Harriet Nelson, my mother was a square.

“Square” is usually used as a term of derision by youngsters too pampered to know what they are talking about — or by revolutionaries whose immediate goal is to weaken families by dividing parents and children, thereby to help advance the Permanent Leftist Revolution.

That of course is not how I mean the word. My mother was “square” because she was honest, thoughtful, well-mannered, self-disciplined, modest, and responsible;  because she had plenty of good old-fashioned horse sense,  was resistant to trendy nonsense, and loyal to her family and friends; because she obeyed sensible rules, thought and spoke sensibly in words that everyone could understand, and never cheated anyone.

What was wrong with parents like her was not that they were square, but that they were not nearly square enough — by which I mean: Even more confident in their resistance to pretentious but authoritative-sounding nonsense when asserted by their own government or by “experts” in the so-called “helping professions”.

I never knew south St. Louis resident Ruth Andrews.  She was older than me and is gone now.  But she and I had something in common: We wrote letters to newspapers. Late in her life, she wrote:

“My parents have been gone a long time, but not a day goes by I don’t think of something I could have done to make their lives better, and there’s no way to make it up to them….”

[Letter to the Editor, South Side Journal, June 4, 1997]

I knew exactly what she meant and how she felt when she wrote those words because the same is true for me.

“My whole life was one continuous misdemeanor,” Don Ameche’s character says in one of the early scenes in the wonderful 1943 motion picture Heaven Can Wait.

The same is true here, and the worst misdemeanor in my life was my failure to realize earlier than I did the enormous moral debt that I owed to my mother, aside from that conflict. I lost count of the days after her death when my heart ached with regret and self-contempt.

Had I the power, I would not erase that conflict from our lives.  Instead, I would erase my life.  The happiness and serenity that were given to me in those years came at too great a cost to my mother.

Of course we cannot rewrite the script of our lives. But if anyone with the power to do so were to ask me:  Would you agree to have every hour of your life erased and thereby to erase all the unhappiness that you caused your mother to endure, albeit unwittingly and unintentionally?

I would answer YES in the blink of an eye.

— Comments —

Dianne writes:

So very poignant…

This deeply touched me on so many levels.

Kathy G. writes:

For Alan:

From what you have written about your mother, and being a mother myself, I think you are being hard on yourself. Children are an immense joy, and a heartbreak. They can’t help but hurt your feelings at times, give you grief, worry you to distraction, but no mother I know would trade a minute of it for anything. If your mother was given the choice to have not had you, the idea would appall her. Nothing good or worthwhile in life comes easy, yet paradoxically, most mothers persist in trying to protect our babies from all hurt, all hardship. It is how we are wired, what we do. And sometimes it is easier for a tired mom to just do tasks herself than deal with recalcitrant kids. Add to that the guilt working mothers have, and their unwillingness to be “the bad guy” in the few hours they have with their kids. Insightfully, you recognize the issues you had were probably the lack of a husband and father to balance that preponderance of mothering of her boy. The tragedy is the breakup of your family, not your existence. You were her achievement, her true legacy, and from my vantage point, she did a darn good job.

Laura writes:

Agreed. Couldn’t have said it better.

Alan’s essay would have been perfect if not for his bitterness toward himself. No mother would approve of that.

I don’t approve of it, but I understand.

May his dear mother rest in peace. And may others benefit from this wisdom.

Holly writes:

Thank you, Alan, for sharing. I relate a lot to your situation.

Thank you to the commenters also, especially Kathy.

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