Honoring those who mother us
This week, a dear, dear friend passed from this life into eternity on her 91st birthday.
That’s made me contemplate the people who’ve influenced me, mentored me, loved me, challenged me, criticized me and
I’m grateful for my mother who nurtured creativity and independence and worked hard to provide a home for my brothers and me; for my grandmother, aunts, Granny and other ladies who invested in my life. I’m grateful for daughters who are fantastic mothers to their children and to each of them for helping to nurture their younger brothers.
Over the past 34 years, I’ve had the privilege of being a mother. (Yes, it’s a privilege, not a burden.) It has been glorious, frustrating, demanding, blessing, good, bad and everything in between. I’ve had success and failure. I’ve felt pleased and despairing discouragement. And, it’s not over. It’s never over.
Even if one is no longer “mothering” with the dayto-day demands of feeding, clothing, providing a home, your children are part of you and you’re constantly praying for them and thinking of ways to bless them.
“Granny” ~ Barbara Schumacher Engle ~ passed from this life to eternity early Monday morning on her 91st birthday.
So many, many memories, all good, of this dear sweet lady. She was not my “granny” by birth, but by love, by choice.
I met her when I was 13, she was our next door neighbor and my mother’s dear, dear friend. She was a place to run when I didn’t get along with Mother and she always had wise counsel.
“Are you bragging or complaining?” she would ask in her typical Yankee style.
Her widowed father used to walk the sidewalks of the neighborhood at twilight smoking his pipe. The aroma of the sweet tobacco is still etched in my memory.
We called her “Granny” because in the Deep South back in the 1950s and 1960s, children did not call an adult by their first name. A very good friend would become “aunt,” instead of “Miss Barbara,” but she would not have Aunt Barbara or Miss Barbara. So, “Granny” stuck. Her husband was “Grampy” or sometimes grumpy Grampy.
She was an eclectic artist, a skilled baker, an excellent cook, a talented seamstress. She carded and spun wool into yarn, dyed it with natural dyes as did the pioneers, knitted sweaters, dolls, stuffed toys. For one beautiful black wool sweater, she made buttons from sliced black walnuts.
I still have dolls and toys she knitted.
She crocheted, tatted, made bobbin lace.
Together, she and Grampy kept bees and put up honey.
She gardened.
She loved!
My brothers took on the challenge of climbing a very long rope to the tree limb where it was tied to earn a fresh batch of hot, homemade donuts.
For some time now, she lived with one of her three sons, but she was still there every time I called. And, I usually called on Sundays so she and my mother could visit.
Today, would have been her 91st birthday and I was preparing to call but received the call from her youngest son of her home going.
Oh, what a blessing she has been to me! She will be sorely missed!
She “mothered” me. Mothering used as a verb has traditionally been synonymous with nurture, care, kindness, feeding, soothing, discipling, counseling, correcting.
Thirty years ago, with four young daughters, I often felt overwhelmed and incompetent. I looked at ladies 15 to 20 years older with teen-age and grown children and thought they had it all together. They told me they didn’t, but I still thought they did.
Scripture has much to say about mothers and about the characteristics of mothers. In Isaiah, God uses the analogy of a nursing mother to describe himself.
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Isaiah 49:15
“As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you….” Isaiah 66:13
And, the Apostle Paul wrote: “But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.” 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8
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Editor’s note: Annette Beard is the managing editor of The Times of Northeast Benton County, chosen the best small weekly newspaper in Arkansas for five of the past six years. A native of Louisiana, she moved to northwest Arkansas in 1980 to work for the Benton County Daily Record. She has nine children, five sonsin-law, eight grandsons, three granddaughters and another grandchild due in December. She can be reached at abeard@nwadg.com.