Mortal Remains
About Mother
As I write this, it is Mother's Day. Our pastor's custom on this day is to invite one (and only one) member of the congregation to volunteer a tribute from the lectern to his or her mother. I have always felt I owed this to my mother, and have some vague guilt about not hopping up to speak during the interval between the invitation and the moment when someone else seizes the day. But in that interval I also find myself perplexed to find nothing more to say, really, than "She was a good mother," for that to my mind is a very close to perfect summary. While it would not mean much to those who didn't know her, it would be mean a great deal to those who did.
If anyone cared to gather and analyze my writings, he might wonder whether I even had a mother, for my father looms very large in them as my first and most powerfully defining master. He was the person who gave me things to think about, taught me how to think, and furnished a living example of the product of such thought. When I am doing mental labor and displaying its product, I am speaking from, with, and to my father, not my mother.
She sustained this work, and perhaps even more important, did not hinder it. My brother and I encountered our father not as in any sense a gentle nurturer (although he was obviously very concerned with our well-being)—that was Mother's job. He was something else: the objective "one with whom we had to do," the commanding and disciplining Other, the Gegenüber against which our own distinctive selves took shape. Our nickname for him was "El Conquistador," and he did not need to interact constantly with us to make his time with us "quality time." He could put an amazing amount of "quality" into very few minutes, and was giving it even when he was trying his best to ignore us. Is this kind of fatherly potency a rare thing these days? I think it must be.
Simply to Love
I found nothing similarly striking in our mother, but upon reflection think this is because of her closeness to us. We had fed at her breast and thereafter she continued to nurture us in all ways. She was always "with us" in a manner our father was not, and we were supremely used to her. Where my father challenged us and always had to be calculated for, Mother did not in any significant way. Perhaps oddly—and perhaps not—one of the things that sticks in my mind about her is that, once while I was visiting my parents when I was probably in my forties and a husband and father myself, she unconsciously called me "honey" while giving me some domestic directions. I took note at the time that this did not strike me as strange, even at my age. If she had lived to be a hundred, she would have called me "honey" in my eighties, and it would have sounded perfectly natural, for she was our Mother.
While our father formed us essentially by disturbing us and inviting us to disturb him, Mother did the same by being a reliably sympathetic presence, an unfailingly generous medium of life. Mother was the earth in which we were anchored and fed, and our father was the husbandman who trained and pruned the plant and fitted it to deal with pests—both are necessary for its health.
Having little to say about Mother is in fact an honor to her memory; it means I think she was doing her job. I have noticed that those who have a great deal to say about their mothers are often people raised in what is now called a "dysfunctional" family, or in what I would consider an irregular, often dangerously irregular, situation—yes, even when the mother is an acknowledged model of spectacular piety. One would have a hard time convincing me that characteristically feminine piety absorbed from very religious women is good for sons, whose relation to God is also peculiar to their sex and a ruling paradigm when set against the piety of women. I thanked the Lord that my mother was who she was, rather than like certain female relatives who thought my father and his boys could use reforming to a better regulated form of religion. No, Mother suited us all very well because she was happy enough simply to love us, as she—like Sarah Smith of Golders Green—loved so many that came to her because love flowed from her like honey from the Rock.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on Motherhood from the online archives
more from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
Bach's Cantata BWV 106, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbesteZeit (God's time is the very best time) by Ken Myers
32.2—March/April 2019
Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West, Volume II by Paul Gosselin by Louis Markos
18.8—October 2005
European Islam & the Doubtful Future of Christian Europe by William Murchison
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
