Spiritual Autobiography

Back to mommy.  I eventually ended up going to Prairie.  I ended up working in a very small church, with a very small salary (let's face it, we were poor), and frankly, our relationship never got healed back up.  Here was the thing.  She needed me to be something I wasn't so that she could feel okay about herself.  I needed to be in a "respectable" upper middle class lifestyle.  She knew that I could have easily pulled it off, but I didn't do it.  So she became very, very angry at me.

The only problem was, she couldn't admit to herself that she was angry at me.  So we could never really resolve the problem.  She died with it unresolved. 

How can I even begin to tell you about my mom?  Maybe this will give you a little sense of what she was like.  The very first time she met you aunt, my future wife, can you guess what the first words out of her mouth were?  I had been engaged to another woman named Nancy earlier in my life (the one God told me to date).  She was like Miss America pretty and she had my mom and dad wrapped around her little finger.  And yes, she was a wonderful woman in every way.  Not a thing in the world wrong with her or anything like that.

So what are the first words, the very first words out of her mouth when she meets the young lady who is soon to become her daughter-in-law?  "You aren't as pretty as the other Nancy."  I kid you not.

Now we had just begun dating.  We were just started, you understand.  Neither one of us realized how quickly things were going to develop between us.  As far as we both knew, we were just dating.  And within five minutes of making the first comment my dear old mom is inquiring about the possibility of grandchildren appearing on the scene.  And no, I'm not making this up!

There was a time, years later, when I thought we were going to turn the corner.  I thought I was going to regain the golden child status, if only for awhile.  None of my other siblings were even married, and your aunt and I (fanfare and trumpets, please) produced a grandchild?  Not only that, we had two of them!  Before anyone else had even one of them.  Surely the depth of her disappointment in me would dissipate that the sunshine of her approval would once again shine on me.

Didn't happen.  She loved those grandkids, but the kids themselves became a source of struggle.  Here is an example of what would happen.  Mom would watch the Today show.  They would tell her that eggs were bad.  She would call us.  We had to promise to cut down to the recommended number of eggs/week for her grandkids.  And we wouldn't agree to do it.  And she would be mad at us.

Do you have any idea how many different things the Today show would give you to be scared about over the course of a given month?  And the thing is, one month they'd tell you that the new research said something was bad for you.  And then six months later they would take it back.

So we weren't raising the grandkids right.  I wouldn't quit working at this tiny little church that simply wasn't growing.  She was mad at me but she couldn't admit to herself that she was mad at me because I was her beloved son, so how could she be mad at me?  And I would go driving up to visit her and dad and the closer I got to Rockford, IL, the more TUMS I would eat.  I would gobble them down like popcorn.

I thought about ending the relationship.  I didn't want to, but it was tearing me up so badly.  But I couldn't do it.  My dad is such a great guy.  There was no way I could deny him access to his only grandchildren.  So I sucked it up, kept gobbling TUMS, and hung in there.

To be continued . . .