The Gospel According To Mom
May 11, 2006

The day after Easter my mom dropped the bombshell.

We were having one of our weekly Monday phone chats; she doesn't do email, and we live 400 miles apart, so we resort to the infernal machine to stay in touch. A mild stroke she suffered five years ago, at age 80, left her pretty much housebound, so she watches a lot of TV. And she'd spent the day soaking up televised Easter services, religious observances (and who knows how many reruns of The Ten Commandments) the way we kids used to suck up marshmallow bunnies.

"Maybe we should have done more of those things when you kids were little," she confessed wistfully.

"You mean, like go to church?" I tried not to splutter.

"We should have given you more traditions," she sighed.

This came as a big shock to me. I've always felt our non-traditional, cheerfully bohemian upbringing was the saving grace of my youth, the lifeline by which I managed to survive the horrors of puberty and junior high school. True, I rarely saw the inside of a church until my friend Joan got married in one after our first year of college. But let's rewind here for a minute and examine the facts. There was a reason we never went to church: my mom had had her fill of them as the daughter of a Methodist minister growing up in parish churches all over Nebraska.

My grandfather (known throughout the family as The Rev) was a charming and witty man with a literary bent, a teetotaller, a non-smoker, and a conservative right-wing Republican whose uncompromising moral and social views drove at least five of his six children to become lifelong liberal Democrats. My mom moved to California with her sister, and eventually married my dad, the sailor, whose private relationship with whatever god had shepherded him safely through World War II did not require the formality of a church.

(My dad was the only one in the family who never bothered to conceal his bad habits from The Rev—unlike my mom and her siblings, who always ran around frantically snuffing out butts and hiding beers when Grandpa pulled into the driveway. After 20 years in the navy, my dad figured he'd earned the right to smoke in front of his father-in-law.)

It's not that my parents were godless heathens. They just believed spiritual life should be a matter of personal choice, not a one-size-fits-all doctrine imposed by a church. And religious affiliation hardly guarantees morality, as thousands of years of bloodthirsty faith-based crusades should have taught us by now. Morality isn't something you learn from a sermon; it grows over time, from exposure to kindness, compassion and respect for others. On those terms, our moral education was never neglected, even if it didn't come from prayer books and hymnals.

But, hey, our family had our traditions. Every Saturday night at 11:15, Mom popped popcorn for my brothers and I as we all settled in to watch the weekly movie offering on The Fabulous 52 while my dad worked the graveyard shift. Every summer we took a three-day, two-night family vacation to Disneyland, an hour away from our house in Hermosa Beach via surface streets, past cow pastures and oil fields. My brothers and I jockeyed for position to be the first one to spot the tip of the Matterhorn towering above the freeway.

Every Thanksgiving night, when we'd digested our turkey and pies, the five of us prowled around the house playing Murder In The Dark, giggling in the shadows. And it was a fact of life as certain as any gospel that whenever the family sat down to a few hands of poker, my dad invariably raised the pot, even after the rest of us had hopefully checked. These are memory snapshots from a happy childhood, however unorthodox. What more could you ask of your parents?

Both my parents loved to read, and we kids picked up the habit early on; my dad was always out in the garage building us more bookshelves. A voracious appetite for reading and sharing our discoveries continues between my mom and I to this day. She introduced me to Anne Of Green Gables, Little Women, the illustrated poetry of William Blake. I got her hooked on Diana Gabaldon and Harry Potter. When we were growing up, she subscribed to just about every magazing in the known world. (There are stacks of National Geographic in her garage that date back to the Mesozoic Age.) She instilled in us the curiosity to read, to look up what we didn't know, to learn; to think for ourselves.

Best of all, my mom loved me, so that in later years, when I found love again, I knew how to act. So what if we didn't go to church? We were lucky enough to be raised in the ministry of love, laughter and learning.

Consider how tough it must be for a mother, worrying about all her perceived mistakes, wondering if she ever did anything right. If your mom is still around to thank, now's the time to do it.