Came to Believe 5-11-14

Anderson, South Carolina

Mother’s Day is a happy day of abundant pink and red carnations for mothers in churches across the land. Relieved of unrelenting responsibility, if but for ninety minutes, mothers are taken out for a meal and feted as queen for a day. Industrious families will even do the cooking themselves on mom’s day. Mothers have perhaps the most important job in any civilized culture; transmitting values, guidance, providing nourishment, safety, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of self-worth. As on Super Bowl Sunday, accretions of cars were seen at many houses, evidence of mothers being fawned over by adoring adult children.

I celebrated this day in a very different way; lighting a votive candle for my mom and going to the dump.

A dear friend was raised in circumstances of extreme wealth and social privilege, attending the finest boarding schools in Europe, having virtually every option money can buy, except for the freedom to believe in herself. Money, power, and social expectations at the top crushed her spirits and for decades she has struggled with being a disinherited economic refugee in another land, despite a chance to own factories and palaces.

Mothers have a primary role in the formation of our self image. It will take a lot more than a pink carnation to overcome a mother’s belief a young daughter is responsible for a wealthy father’s violent suicide. It will take more than a truckload of red flowers to help this daughter see her innocence in this tragedy.

I was raised in very ordinary lower middle class circumstances by a struggling single mother who desperately wanted to be part of the very economic social caste which destroyed my friend’s sense of self. Furs, diamonds, Cadillacs, and a short paragraph in the Social Register never did a thing to change our economic or social realities; the Cadillacs got repossessed and the checks bounced. I don’t remember Mother ever being in a church to get pink or red carnations. We weren’t allowed to call her Mom.

About a week ago I received an ignominious box of priority mail at the post office from one of my brothers. I was instantly reminded of an anonymous crate I received twenty years ago containing what I thought to be all the physical evidence of my existence in a family that had me believe I was an unwanted afterthought. What a surprise on Mother’s day Eve twenty years later to be recipient of compelling new fifty—year-old evidence that what I had come to believe all these years was no less destructive than what an industrialist’s daughter believed; I could only be included in family if I was willing to give up my own dreams and go along with the script laid out for me. I instantly realized the destruction of one’s dreams happens just as easily in lower economic castes as it does in the stratosphere of great wealth, it has nothing to do with finance.

I gave more than fourty years attempting to follow the script, only to find this was never good enough. My industrialist refugee from the other side of the world, from another economic realm, and the other end of the educational spectrum also found following the script was not good enough. We both found ourselves crushed, clueless as to whom we really are.

In opening that box, fifty years of frozen memories sublimated and I was reminded my status as a familial refugee was very real fifty years ago and remains so into the present era. I was reading in 10 pt blue courier font on laid linen paper, my mother’s beliefs that I have a fundamental inability to manage life, that I am inferior to my siblings’ abilities to manage their affairs.

During those fifty years I spent a whole lot of hours in the offices of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and clergy; attempting to embrace the possibility I might have some justification for remaining on this world; that I did not have to follow someone else’s script. For some years now I have actually come to believe I might have written new beliefs; that I did not have to justify my place in society. Alas, in the space of minutes I was to find my work is yet incomplete. The dull ache seeping in around the edges of my soul while reading that 10 point courier font told me I am still a work in progress.

It then occurred to me I’m no longer required to honor those ancient messages of incompetence and inferiority; I stopped reading. Most of those letters written to me during my first years in one of our great universities remain unread this Mother’s Day. I went to the church. Next to the buckets of carnations I knelt down and lit a votive candle for Mother and offered a short prayer for her soul.

I then took those fine linen papers with their 10 pt blue courier font to the recycling dump. While placing them in the “Mixed Papers” bin, I called my industrial refugee and together we decided it was time to let go of ancient messages we are no longer required to believe. I came to believe “Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake.”

I left the dump and went and enjoyed a fine Mother’s Day dinner at a table where I can believe what I want.

Blessings

Craig C. Johnson