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| "Climbing Mother" by Brian Kershisnik |
Here’s
a tribute to my mother: Santa Teresa La Tranquila. I wish I could remember
sitting in her sacred lap, sucking my finger as she showed me the magic of
books, of words, of stories. I wish I could hear again the songs she sang into
my sleeping spirit. My mother is one of the gentle ones. Santa Teresa de la
Exquisita Caridad.
She
taught me that charity never fails. True love overcomes all things and is everything.
It is the it of it all. Love is the real deal. She loves people, all people.
You see it in her dancing brown eyes when you meet her and she takes your name
into her mouth and tastes the essence of it and never forgets it. Names are
sacred for her, not as a source of power, but as a source of connection, of
affection. She used to have every phone number in our neighborhood memorized,
so she could call out her kindness at the hint of a whisper of need.
One day
when I had grown into a lanky, surly teenager, I tried to throw my father down
the stairs. It was not a good day, you could say. When I was getting ready for
bed that night, mom came and leaned in the doorway. This is what she said: “What
happened to the little boy who used to sit on my lap and read with me? I miss
my Robbie-do.” Still makes me cry to think of it. What is it like to watch life
drift away from its source, to become something so foreign and so strange? To
become a teenager?
She
used to say things when I was young that baffled me. “I am only one person; I
can only do one thing at a time.” Now, as my own flock of sacred sparrows surrounds
me and my wife, fluttering and flitting and squawking their raucous cacophony
of urgent demands, I understand. She was the vine. We needed her. She was the nourisher.
Oh, there were days she told us she needed to walk outside. I found her one day
outside sitting on the corner of the sidewalk a block from our house, just
drinking in the silence and the dark of the starlight sky.
“I have
figured out the true never-ending story, and it has nothing to do whatever with
a dog-dragon. It is the story of laundry. This is the story that never ends.” Motherhood
is relentless, like the spin of the earth, like the tides. Mom clothed us,
protected us, fed us. Watched us run through the orchard across the street,
throwing apples and climbing trees. She emptied herself for us. We came from
her and became the her of her, in a way. Her reason for being.
“Have
fun. Be good. If you can’t do both, be good.” This she said almost every time I
left the house. I have since learned that there is outrageous fun in goodness, extravagant,
wild joy in it; but she was speaking to a mind lacking a frontal cortex. Always
keep this in mind.
I named
my daughter after her. Gatherer. Teresa of the light. Tessa of the radiance.
Harvester of haloed glistening luminosity. At her naming and blessing, Tessa
lay still and engaged as a nun as a powerful circle of men enfolded her. I
watched her eyes during the prayer. They were intent on my face. She was draped
in a flowing white dress cut from the cloth of my mother’s temple sealing dress,
a dress my mom made herself because she is modest and simple and lovely. Because
she is unadorned beauty and she knows what matters. May the life of this little
gatherer of light be cut from the same cloth as her grandmother’s.
On my
mother’s birthday this year, we drove to Salt Lake together to listen to my
older brother’s band play. On the car ride up mom told stories about her
childhood. But the notable thing was mom’s relative absence from so many of her
own stories. The stories were always about others, like her life has been. Her
kind hero big sister Kris, the Dave Silva Fan Club, the people at the warehouse
where she used to go to church in Southern California. You should have seen the
way mom watched as God might as her oldest son played quirky music on the bass
and keyboard and theremin accompanied by quirky, holy men, one of whom played a
singing saw (I imagined the love God must feel for every person in that small
indie record shop that evening, divine love nestling into their pockets like coins,
just to be close to them; this is the love of a parent). I thought about the
small boy I used to watch perched atop the piano bench with perfect posture,
magic fingers moving, and knew mom was thinking of that same boy, now grown
grand, but still her sacred sparrow, twig-legged and open-beaked. She smiled
like transfiguration there.
My mom
suffers long, and is kind, and envies not, and is not anywhere close to puffed
up, has never sought her own (perhaps has lost any claim of ownership
whatsoever), is not easily provoked (trust me, I would know), thinks no evil,
and rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all
things, endures all things. My mom is the pure love of Christ, and she endures
forever.
Well,
who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Who put the ram in the rama
lama ding dong? Who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop? Who put the dip
in the dip da dip da dip? It was mom. And, boy, am I glad she did.
