Annual Dance Service
May 8, 2011
Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
FIVE REFLECTIONS ON “IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE…”
Carol Carter Walker:
In my mother’s house
There was poetry, read, memorized and declaimed with appropriate melodramatic flourishes.
In my mother’s house
There was a quest for knowledge. We grew up with the Encyclopedia Britannica near by and the oft‐dreaded words, “Look it up”‐‐ my parents’ usual response to fact‐based inquiries at the dinner table.
In my mother’s house
There were piano lessons and music lessons and dance lessons. There was a singing group of me and my two sisters—The Carter Sisters.
In my mother’s house
There was summer away camp and lots of guided play—my mother was a teacher—and believed that every moment should be a teachable moment.
In my mother’s house
There were lots of books and no tolerance for trashy magazines—maybe that’s why they’re a guilty pleasure for me today.
There were rituals—fish on Fridays, hot dogs and beans on Tuesdays, a roast on Sundays— grace before all meals.
There was insistence on church attendance, but some degree of tolerance to challenge what we heard there. My mother had wanted to be a doctor, but couldn’t afford medical school. She became a biology teacher, instead. She always sought to reconcile her scientific and religious beliefs. Unitarian Universalism would probably have appealed to her.
Sundays were a day for church—Sunday School early, a regular church service and then a weekly family gathering right across the street where my aunt and uncle lived. Then, a ritual of ‘pop‐calling’—maybe three of four short visits on Sunday afternoon and evening to relatives and friends. No advance notice. No Evites.
In my mother’s house, we were somewhat cocooned and inoculated from the harsher aspects of racism and discrimination. When I was old enough to go downtown to the movies, the movies were integrated. When I was old enough to be interested in eating out, restaurants were desegregated.
In my mother’s house, there was a sense of discomfort—in knowing that I’d been conceived—at least according to my mother’s version—to keep my father from the draft. Was I really wanted? Should I really be here?
In my mother’s house, I grew up conflicted. I left home at 13 to go first to boarding school and then to college. But I always thought I was missing out on something at home. Maybe that’s why after living in New York and Chicago, and even Takoma Park, I moved back to my family house for nearly 20 years.
In my mother’s house, there was emphasis on the factual, but a covering over, even a repression, of emotions.
In that house of my birth, essentially my mother’s house, lies the foundation of all that I am and all that I am not. After years of struggle and wondering, I’m at peace in my mother’s house.
Andrew Valliere:
In my Mother’s house, I learned never to give up. My Mother has encouraged me to do my best in all things. Whether it was riding a bike without having been introduced to the concept of slowing down ‐‐ “Brake, brake!” “What do you mean, brake?” (I crashed, but got right back up.) ‐‐ or when I was swimming on our neighborhood pool’s swim team, and was quite bad, I still was supported by my cheering Mom, and so continued to try improving my times at each meet.
Back when I lived in Massachusetts, I used to do TaeKwonDo, a Korean martial art. It was a sport that I enjoyed a lot. In order to move to the next rank, I had to go through a set of tests with kicks, punches, and board breaks. I had almost made it to the highest rank, Black Belt, and I only had a few more ranks to go. For this specific test, I passed everything but the board‐breaking. I attempted to break the board numerous times yet did not succeed. Then the master said he would come back to me later and proceeded with testing the other children, while one of his assistant instructors worked with me on the kick in the back room. Even with this additional help, I still could not break the board with this particular kick, the tornado kick, which was a difficult kick to do. I then failed the test.
Although I was disappointed, my Mother encouraged me to try to improve and break the board at the next test. She spent lots of time helping me by holding practice boards while I kicked at them. A month or so later, when the time for the next test came around, I had completely mastered the kick. I even broke the board on the first try.
In my Mother’s house, I learned never to give up and always to keep trying.
Nancy Boardman:
In My Mother’s House was the love of a kind‐hearted, quiet spoken woman – who gave of herself constantly to her family, friends, her students, church, and organizations she joined in the small iowa towns where we lived in my early years ‐ and later in Michigan’s upper peninsula.
I was a World War II baby – born shortly before Pearl Harbor. Life was not easy for my mother, Dorothy Boardman, in my early years. My father, Bill Boardman, joined the Coast Guard and left for alaska during the war when I was only 9 months old. He returned when i was two – to get a divorce because he had fallen in love with someone else – whom he later married. He then spent the rest of his life in Alaska. I would see him only occasionally when he came back to visit his parents and me every few years.
With her marriage very unexpectedly ended ‐ mom became a single parent. We moved in with my grandparents ‐ while she returned to college at Iowa State to get a degree in home economics so she could then get a job teaching to support us. In the mid‐1940’s being divorced was not very common ‐ and I later learned was the cause of great anger towards my father by both his parents and my mother’s parents. Both of these sets of grandparents lived in the same small iowa town where we did. Their homes became mine.
Thinking back on those formative childhood years ‐ i realized how none of that anger towards my father was expressed or vented onto me. How wise I now believe that was! Instead I only felt surrounded by a mother and grandparents whose love and attention was never in doubt. They raised me calmly and cheerfully in their quiet way. I had friends to play with, colored live easter chicks one year, (poor things didn’t survive my playing with them very long!) And exciting visits to the small town restaurant my grandparents owned and ran– where Mom would wait on tables when she had time from her college studies.
After Mom got her degree we moved to another small Iowa town, where she taught Home Economics in the local high school. I was in kindergarten then. She made great friends with the other teachers – and met and fell in love with my new dad – Richard Crowther – who some of you have met. They married when i was seven. And had a very long and happy life together – with a brother and sister coming into my life when i was 11 and 15 years old. Mom died in 1999. But before then, when i was 55, we went to the Upper Marlboro Court House and Dad adopted me! I know it was certainly a surprise to the judge, and brought great happiness to my mother – and of course to me. And to my sons Miguel and Jaime – who Dad had told me he wanted to have as his legal grandchildren.
My mother trusted and supported me through my own divorce in my twenties, and welcomed her new Portuguese son‐in‐law, Manuel Pereira, into our family without any question in my thirties. She was one of the least judgemental people i have ever known! She had a wonderful simplicity and inner goodness that i am sure – as the inspiring musical dance performance we have just experienced says ‐ helped to raise me up to more than I could be.
Thank you for this opportunity to reflect and share my thoughts about my very special mother ‐ Dorothy Crowther. Her love will always be an integral part of who I am.
John Bartoli:
When I think of my mother’s house I don’t think of the house I grew up in. My mother ran a grocery store during the day and weekends and at night she cooked dinner. The one day a week that the store was closed was her day for shopping, laundry, and getting all the other household things done that needed to be done. That house was never a home to me.
What I think of as my mother’s house is the condo she lived in right around the corner from here. She moved there after my father died and lived there for more than 30 years, longer than in the house I grew up in. And that’s the house I remember her in.
In my mother’s house there was always a warm delicious smell of food cooking. She could put together a meal for 4 or 14 on pretty much a moment’s notice. And as she got older, her cooking got tastier and more savory. She spent a lot of time watching all the gourmet cooking shows on TV and trying out new recipes. She was innovative and thrifty, using up everything and not throwing much away. The food was always glorious. And often so very simple, but oh so tasty! My Mom put a lot of love in that cooking. I had a chance to witness an artist with food at first hand and I ignored it.
I never really appreciated all that love. I mostly avoided it. I’d tell myself that it was too difficult to try to help her. And it was, or seemed to be. She was so quick and sure, with no wasted moves. She didn’t seem to have time to show me anything and even when she did I couldn’t follow her hurried instructions. I seemed to always be in the way. The only thing I could provide was setting the table, washing the dishes and cleaning up. To this day, when we go off with friends on a vacation, I’m the one that organizes the guys to make sure every last fork and glass and crumb are cleaned off the table. I learned that from my Mom, I did.
So I cook only once in a while. But I never tried anything much beyond steaks on the grill or a spaghetti dinner. Cooking was something I felt I did not have the talent for. I had missed whatever chance I had to learn.
I’ve been retired since August last year and my days are my own. My wife Penny is still working. She said she would give me at least one year at home so I can acclimate to retirement. At least that’s what she said. One Monday night she came home from work and commuting exhausted and hungry. “Why don’t you cook,” she said, “you’re not doing anything!”
She was right. I started that night. I scoured the freezer for bits and pieces of leftover this and that and put together a pretty good meal. The next night I did the same. I found myself in grocery stores imagining how I could use this vegetable or that piece of meat in a meal. I’d ask people behind the counter for ideas on how to prepare something. I’d buy it, bring it home, find a simple recipe, adjust it to taste, and cook it.
Penny loves the meals saying that I cook a lot like my Mom did.
She’s right. Mom had taught me well even though I didn’t know it. She left me with the recipe book. I just have to read it.
I love you Mom.
Rev. Diane Teichert:
In my mother’s house… actually, behind my mother’s house, there was a vegetable garden. She was raised a city girl, but as a young mother she learned how to grow splendid tomatoes, corn, beans, and more. There is a favorite photo, taken by my father, of my mother coming up the back steps with her apron full of scrumptious red tomatoes and a proud, happy smile on her face.
When I was four, my parents bought their first house, a fixer‐upper, inside and out, with a wild unruly back yard. In the way back were two large apple trees which in a few years my friend Ginny and I would love to climb, to read our books in summer and get away from my little sisters, and also a blueberry patch, and raspberries, and a gooseberry bush along the high fence we shared with Mr. Pernice’s truck farm, and peonies along Mr. and Mrs. Meyer’s low picket fence.
It was all a mess when we moved in, but the part of the yard closest to the house was severely overgrown, in need of serious taming. And that’s where my mother’s vegetable garden was to be. I remember the sweet peas. They’d taken over, and were growing everywhere. I can still see the jumble of vines and still hear someone muttering about how stubborn they are.
Behind my mother’s house, there was a vegetable garden. Because I do not remember being required to help plant and weed, I wonder now if the garden was my mother’s hide‐away. Maybe it was her place of renewal. Maybe gardening was her spiritual discipline through the trials and demands of raising a large family, helping her to make‐do‐just‐fine with hand‐me‐down clothes for her children and spaghetti without meat in the sauce the night before payday.
Behind my mother’s house, there was a vegetable garden. And behind mine, too. Almost everywhere I have lived, rented or owned, I’ve had a vegetable garden. It gives me solace to get out there to turn the soil in early spring, to plant the seeds or seedlings, to weed, water and to tend. And it gives me pleasure to harvest, though (strangely) that’s been the hardest gardening task to remember, except for the year we built raised beds in our sunny front yard. There, what was ready to pick was visible every single time we went in or out, even if it was just to bring in the morning paper.
Behind my mother’s house, there was a vegetable garden. And behind mine, too. And right now, behind each of my children’s houses, on the deck or porch of their apartments, are containers still awaiting the seedlings they started indoors from seeds during the long cold winter where they each live.
In my mother’s house… actually, behind my mother’s house, there was a vegetable garden. It has survived many years of planting seasons… into the next generations.