“MOTHER’S DAY”
I was raised by women in a patriarchal world. In my childhood days, that used to bother me – why was I the only son whose father had abandoned him? As I grew into adulthood, I began to shift my perspective. Why should I allow my father’s absence to dominate me more than my mother’s presence? Thanks to friends and therapists, I was able to begin to shift from being dominated by my father’s absence to at least a consideration that I ought to be dominated by the love of my mother’s presence. So, I want to thank my mother and all the mothering women who raised me.
My father, for whom I was named, abandoned my mother and me for another woman when I was about a year old. We lived with an Irish woman in Memphis for awhile, and she kept me when my mother worked as a beauty operator (what they were known as then). She nicknamed me “Nibs,” using the Irish word for the British aristocracy who believe that they are the center of the world. Since I was named for my father who had left, “Nibs” stuck. My mother was still in shock; she was poor; and she was looking for shelter. Her grandmother’s sister, Bernice Higgins, had recently been widowed, and she needed physical and fiscal companionship in her small home across and down the Mississippi River from Memphis, in a town called Helena, Arkansas. We moved there sometime during my second year, and it would be my constant and stable home until I got married to Caroline in 1974. I would come back to it often until my mother’s death in 2004.
After my father left our family, I would not see him or hear from him again until the fall of 1970, when I was almost 24. As I indicated, I grew up fatherless in a patriarchal world. I was raised by women, and though my heart hurt deeply at my father’s abandonment of me – it would take me years to notice that he also abandoned my mother – in my adult years, I have sung the praises of these two women who took me on, who raised me, and who taught me perseverance, humor, and compassion: Mary Armour Stroupe, my mother, and Bernice Higgins, my great-great aunt, sister of my great-grandmother, who became a grandmother to me. I called her “Gran.”
Gran told me stories of our family history, of the Browns and Armours. She remembered stories of her great-grandfather William Brown, born in 1827. He was a staunch Presbyterian who used to work in the fields in his religiously prescribed white clothes. The women in the family had to wash these clothes and make them white again despite the mud and fields. While she didn’t care for that religious belief of working in white clothes, she did receive his conservative Presbyterianism and joined First Presbyterian Church of Helena, where I was later baptized and raised as a child of God. Because I grew up in segregation, I knew little about the African-American culture around me. Indeed I didn’t want to know anything about that culture because I had breathed in the white supremacy of the segregated South. If I had known more and had accepted white supremacy less, I would have discovered a culture where matrilineal culture was powerful.
So, today, I want to send up praises of women, especially my mother and my Gran. Gran was not my primary caregiver, but she was right in the mix. She was at home for me every day after school until she died of a heart attack at age 79. My mother was the primary caregiver, and though she worked six days a week in the beauty shop, she seemed to always have time for me after she had walked the mile home from work and had been on her feet all day. She gave me great care, and I want to say “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” from my anxious heart, a heart that survived and grew compassionate because for all her hard-knock life, she was a compassionate, loving woman.
I was talking with our daughter Susan the other day about my mother - “Grandma,” as Susan called her. I am beginning to think about doing some sort of memoir about my mother and her navigation of all the factors in her life while she was raising me: the racism that permeated our lives, our poverty that she sought to shield from me, her being a single woman in a patriarchal world, her deep faith, her powerful intelligence and inquisitive mind, her longing to be made whole. When I asked Susan about her primary thoughts about “Grandma,” she replied that she was impressed by Grandma’s agency in a world that told her that she was meaningless and worthless: a woman abandoned by her man, a woman who had to rely on her own intelligence, work and wit to get her (and me and Gran) through rough times, a woman who would not allow sexism and racism and poverty to define her. So, I’m thinking about such a work, but as I do, for now, I just want to say “Thank you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment