Mother's Day, Part II

The most important lesson I've ever learned, I learned from my Mom. I remember through the eyes of childhood and adolescence, and I don't know how accurate that is. But it's my story, so I get to tell it the way I remember it.

As a child, one of the main activities I remember at church was the annual production of Easter eggs - a massive and complex undertaking, you have NO idea, which I came to view as frivolous and a bit weird (seriously, a LOT of effort went into those eggs). I now realize it was a probably a major source of fundraising for the church, but at the time, it seemed like all the focus on alter flowers and Easter eggs was missing the point.

While Mom always did her part, she and a small cadre of like-minded women also created the Social Concerns Committee. They helped build houses through the local version of Habitat for Humanity; housed and helped a refugee family from southeast Asia; politely suggested that the congregation might want to pay attention to abuses by US-backed governments and militias in Central America, and the violent deaths of aid workers trying to help the local populations there; and of course, organized the ubiquitous canned food drives. This, it seemed to me, was the point.

They seemed like such the minority, the ladies of the Social Concerns Committee. Mom is a very reserved person by nature, and yet I can picture her - was it just once? a hundred times? - standing up to politely, persistently, remind people about the canned food drive, or the house-building work day, or the atrocities in El Salvador. She must have hated that part of it, the standing up and talking. The Social Concerns Committee eventually managed to squeeze a tiny little pot of money out of the budget, but it never seemed to grow beyond the same small cadre of committed women.

I can't ever remember her lecturing my sister and me about any of this, or even talking about it, really. She didn't take us to gawk at poor people, thank goodness. She just went about her business, which somehow made it all the more compelling, because it wasn't anything special. It was just life.

So I learned that what matters most is how you treat the rest of the world. What matters is that you try to do something, whatever you can think to do, no matter how small it seems. I have always believed this was the most important lesson anyone ever taught me, though I'm a long, long way from mastering it. Oh, I am so imperfect in my caring, so easily distracted both by shiny things and little grievances. It's a very hard time to care about injustice and ugliness right now. There's a lot of it, and a lot of indifference to it. It's very hard to see what to do.

But I think about my Mom, the classic introvert, politely reminding people about the canned food drive, and I know that you have to just try to keep on reminding yourself and others about the wrongs and sadness of the world, no matter how much it may seem like no one is listening. And maybe, somebody is listening more closely than you thought.

Thank you, Mom! Happy Mother's Day.