A Tribute to Her Mother

Editor’s Note: This week before Father’s Day is an opportunity to visit the writings of Heather McColl Morgan, daughter of Angus and Denise McColl. Denise, author of Footsteps of the Faithful, passed away on March 29, 2008. She is remembered fondly in military circles for her contributions to the understanding of living a Christ-like life as a wife in the military. Heather’s tribute to her mother will be followed on Thursday by a tribute to her submariner father. Heather is now serving on active duty and anticipating her deployment later this year.

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“She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. . . Her children rise up and call her blessed. . . “ — Proverbs 31:26,28

My mother was someone special. Many of us feel that way about our own, particular maternal figure, and it’s often easy to see why. Some mothers fill our bellies with warm cookies, rub our weary shoulders, and spangle our memorable moments with celebration. My mother was not so great on the making of cookies, not for lack of talent, but of time once three, four, and five daughters tumbled in to fill her days with mud pies and make-believe. She did relish the act of creation: we each have a handmade Christmas stocking from an earlier, craft-making period, and the stitches tell that her sewing was much better than mine is. Somewhere along the way, though, it became less important that she made things for us from scratch, and more important that the household division of labor prepare us for future life on our own. Around sixth grade, we each were assigned our own weekly meal to make. Minus a few confusions of salt for sugar, everyone benefited from the experience of making and partaking together. Mom was the glue that made all the macaroni, popsicle sticks, and glitter hold together: our meals, projects, and special seasons.

Pictures bear witness to posters and coordinated outfits, part of our homecoming rituals for Dad’s return from months on a submarine. In the parenthetical, pregnant times between his coming and going, we never seemed to lag, but enjoyed elaborate 3-dimensional cakes frosted by hand, themed birthday parties by the beach, and visits with family and friends. There were whole days spent in the water, broken only by a midday picnic. Mom at the pool those summers was my first and best glimpse of raw womanly power: elastic, surging, gliding through the water. She was water to me, almost a female foil for Poseidon, willing the oceans to give Dad safe passage, washing, bubbling, brimming and rushing to fill in the empty spaces in our days. She used water especially to fill our free time, sending us back to swim lessons until we completed all of the Red Cross swimming levels, making sure we each felt powerful and at home in the water from an early age. She was savvy enough to redouble her energies by letting our swim instructors wear us out all morning, before swimming with us all afternoon. With extra sets of eyes and arms all around, often in coordination with other mothers, the five of us sisters were far easier to keep safely busy and entertained. Even so, she never let us think that the water was inherently safe, but taught us how to keep a watchful eye on each other. I once watched her, fully-clothed, enter a friend’s backyard pool–her rescue training taking control–when two of my sisters had locked each other in a dire, deep-end struggle past the point of hearing reason. In moments like these, she seemed to wield the power of life and death to me.

That she brought us into the world, creatively sustained us and restored us from skinned knees, broken arms, and wounded pride is God-like and deserves reflection. But that is just the beginning. In the arc of my mother’s story, it seems easy to trace the peaks and valleys. Perhaps the highest peak was when she wrote her book, Footsteps of the Faithful, about our adventures as a military family from Groton to Guam. In a sense, she was a Penelope to my father’s never-ending odyssey, savvy defender of home and hearth while my father, “skilled in all ways of contending,” came and went with the tides through many deployments. But my mother did more than weave tales and pine for Dad’s return. To me, she became larger than life when he was away. Besides the expert (and sometimes dogged) synchronization of schools and soccer, births and homecomings, she strung our days together with a sense of adventure that gave each deployment (and each new home) its own story within the story. She often chose to breathe life into people through her use of language. “The tongue holds the power of death and life” she used to remind us, and exemplified speech that was “seasoned with salt” meant to encourage fellow God-followers and woo future ones (Proverbs 18:21 & Colossians 4:6). She used Scripture in song to help us “hide God’s word in our hearts,” and we marveled at her ability to find that “word aptly spoken” both for her family members and friends. (Psalm 119:11 & Proverbs 25:11).

She could also be like the sea in stormy weather, with unpredictable swells that threatened to capsize conversation. It seems any woman formidable enough to weather life as a Navy spouse would have to have a few barnacles, too. What staggers me, looking in the mirror, is how some of her rough edges have passed on to me with the strength and the salt. I hear her in my arguments about dishes and mail-piles at the end of a long day…on occasion, if I argue accidentally near a mirror, I see her. I stop, I breathe, and wonder. The roles are somewhat reversed: I do not wait, but come home to kiss my husband at day’s end, tally the order and chaos, and am tempted to pronounce. Would I do it any better as a stay-at-home mom…could I? I am my mother’s daughter, and that means strength and effervescence, but also the barnacles. “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing,” I hear my Mom chide, and the implication is that we should speak only to give life to our fellow beings, never to take it (Proverbs 12:18).

My mother and I are both good examples of how difficult it can be to harness the tongue, and well-meaning, purposeful women can often do the most harm to each other with their words. It’s as if the pursuit of excellence in one woman’s life precludes her from allowing another woman’s excellence because it takes another form. One does not have to look far to find examples of this in our current political dialogue, and as a working mother who loved her stay-at-home mother, it saddens me to see women attacking and undermining each other in this way. I lost my mother the year I got married, the same year I also lost my grandmother. I often wonder what we would say to each other, my daughter bowling and beaming around on the floor during my lunch break or holiday leave. Mom usually disapproved of working motherhood, and struggled with the idea of me in harm’s way when I joined the Army. My mother and I probably would have to work hard at affirming one another’s divergent paths in life, and we undoubtedly would have stepped on each other’s toes at times. Even so, there are many unsaid things I wish I could share with her. I wish I could swap insights on marriage, on motherhood, on my vocational adventures. In some ways, the same iron jaw that got her through deployments on the home front is the same one I’ll rely on when I deploy: life in the trenches of childrearing and homemaking might not be so different from going to war. Both require ingenuity, endurance, and courage to face one’s fears in a very fallen world.

What to do with these inheritances? How to find just enough salt and the choicest words for the current task? How will I ensure that whether I am swimming forward or treading water, that my strength will be renewed in proportion to the time and distance required? As I ask myself what she would do in my boots, I realize that my sisters and my daughter each hold clues. My daughter works at taking her first steps, and there is the furrowed brow, the brimming eyes, the hard-set jaw, the determined nostrils. My sisters compete in the rugby field, the office, the classroom and there are the flexing calves, the springing-forward torso, the long, swift arms and the fully-engaged eyebrows. And there–there–is the triumphant, overcoming grin of the struggler-turned-victor. In our best moments as daughters, sisters, mothers, these are insights into very God:

“It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize
it was I who healed them.
⁴ I led them with cords of human kindness,
with ties of love.
To them I was like one who lifts
a little child to the cheek,
and I bent down to feed them.
–Hosea 11:3-4

At first glance, all this nurturing sounds so serene and beautiful. But it’s not so idyllic when you’re sweating, cleaning up the latest mess on the floor, your hair didn’t quite get done and the ever-heavier baby is making excellent headway toward the stairs. Then there is the relative egocentrism of the child: “they did not realize it was I who healed them.” My daughter only sees the one thing she wants us to do for her in that moment, not the stacks of other tasks that must be done, and tries to register her impatience as if she’s got other places to be. In these moments we nurture her, yes, but it is not all peaches-and-cream and butterflies: it is phlegm and milk and blood and excrement, not for the faint of heart. That God’s love for Israel–and for us, through Christ–is nurturing and tender and motherly should not come as a surprise, since life is full of all the toughest and most disgusting things…things mothers are always dealing with. Scripture is replete with more examples of God mothering us, but perhaps the most lasting images of God in this role start with the women we love best. Lest we make God in her image, we must remember that our Mother is a human creature, too. But we celebrate God’s self-revelations through her in the hope that every day she is becoming more herself… more and more fit for heaven. That she always has another hand, hip, or shoulder with which to bring us along in that journey is marvelous.

Questions to Share:

1. In what ways did your mother prepare you for life in the military?

2. In what ways do you believe military parents can prepare their children for deployments?