I spent my entire childhood and a good portion of my early adulthood thwarting every effort my mother made at loving me. Yet some how, it wasn’t until she fell off her thrown that I gave her my heart. For what ever reason, I never let her have me, though she made me, until she proved to me that she was just as broken as I was.

To be perfectly accurate, my mother did not fall off of her thrown, she was pushed. In the earliest memories I hold of my own demonic mutiny, my mother is alone, in a dingy apartment, surrounded by the surging tide of her husband and her then two children. She had no buoy, no raft, no life guard. None held her above the water. And in this tumult, she held the heads of two small children, 2 and 4, above the tossing tide if often at the cost of her own breath. Even in the absurdity of our situation, she withstood the temptation to swim ashore. She held us up in a world bereft of climate control and garbage bags. In a world peopled with the sordid behavior and instability of my father.

In this strange environment she grew. From the childhood of 19 into the motherhood of 20 and even into the servitude of her 25 the isolation of 30 and the violence of 40. Through the escalation of every torment, through the spirited cousin of slavery, and on into harassment and betrayal.

Withstanding in grace.

She was convinced of her savior, harkened to his side and heartened by her one salvation. By some instilment of heavenly fortitude she subsisted on the repose of righteousness and crackers and ketchup. Feeding her children on the milk of her diligence and little else while protecting them from their fathers perpetual absence.

My mothers living motto was never to speak a harsh word about my father in front of her children. And she succeeded. Through his alcoholism, his verbal abuse, through his continual absence and neglect she bolstered the myth of him to both of her children, then to three, four, five and six.

She educated us beyond the scope of motherhood. She gave us a Father God where she could not provide us our father live. Through out our lives we never saw the truth of him. We never saw him either, but that was certainly his doing, not hers. And for 20 years, 19 years longer than anyone should have the strength too, she endured. Not only did she endure. She strove. She strove to provide her children with two parents in one, and to protect them from every conceivable harm. She also strove to fill her children with the wisdom she took from every page of scripture. She raised us with God as father, chancellor and judge. Love they neighbor and above all God.

Despite her struggle, I rebelled. Where I did not rebel against the spiritual father she created for me, I did rebel against her. Where I could resist her I did. Where I could not, I struggled toward bare compliance. I believe the most hurtful things I could do to my mother were to be mean to her children and resist her love. I mastered both. As a prodigy of wit and the progeny of my father I tormented my peaceful mother for 19 years in the meanest ways possible.

I argued every point of discipline, every bit of correction, every word of counsel she sought to bestow until her head swam with furthermores and howevers. From her position, high upon the thrown given her, I could see nothing she said clearly, though I thought it my mission to point to every flaw in argument as if the chastisement of a child was the appropriate time to impose the regulations of academic debate. To this end, I twisted and contorted every bit of gray matter my mother possessed until at some point she let go, no longer allowing me to impose my will upon her in the same vein as my father before me.

When she, at long long last, step from beneath my fathers thumb, and fell from her thrown, though I am not certain of the chain of events, she became real to me. The point at which she put foot to soil and dealt for the first time with the reality of her life and then with the reality of separation, she became my best and most loyal friend.

Although you could not tell it from the history of 20 years, my mother is the sun in my sky. Her grace and the consequence of her commitment to kindness are the only influence God could have given me to keep me from following the madness imbued in me through my father’s blood. Her guidance, though it was thoroughly resisted, has shaped every good part of me. She is my conscience. She is my protection from myself, and she is everything that keeps me from reverting to the selfishness and insanity I am made from.