Mom, Happy Birthday 2.4.26

Today as I took a walk with Emmy, I thought about my mom.  She was born on February 4^th, 1943. The 7^th of 10 children, she would drop out of school without finishing the eighth grade. Only one of her siblings would finish high school – my aunt Mary, who is also the only one still alive.  Mom passed away on November 19^th, 2012, from lung cancer at the age of 69.  She was a lifetime smoker.

Today would be her birthday.  And I did something unusual on my walk today.  Being in a reflective mood, I decided to listen to one of my playlists.  I usually prefer to play a random selection.  The first song was Joan Baez’s “Be of Good Heart”.  The second song was John Mayer’s “In the Blood.”  Right away, they made me think of my childhood and my mom. I love lyrics.  So, I guess they are in the playlist for a reason.  After listening to them, I had an urgent desire to visit my mom’s gravesite today.  So, I did.

I never asked mom the questions I should have asked when she was alive. My aunt Mary, who was four years older than mom, will occasionally give me a few insights into their childhood together when I visit her.  If my childhood was difficult, and it was, my mother’s childhood was worse multiple times over.  That is part of the explanation as to why Mom fell for Dad when their paths crossed when she was 17 years old. He was 27.  He got her pregnant and she birthed me at the age of 18.  Dad then got mom pregnant again the following three years, resulting in her being a mom to four young children at the age of 21.

If mom thought life would be better with dad, she was mistaken. Life with Dad was hell.  She would finally leave him after 11 brutal years. During that time, she would do her best to try to protect us. And once she left him, she did her best to love us. Her own mother was not a good mother. So, she really had no role model.  That said, she did the one thing that every good parent does – she loved us unconditionally.  They say that home is where your mom is.  That was certainly true for me, especially when I missed the entire second half of my junior year in college due to severe mononucleosis.  Mom not only nursed me back to health, but she also helped me through a period of severe depression triggered by the events that surrounded my sickness.

I loved my mom – so much.  However, I also wanted to escape the painful memories of my childhood. So, I was torn. The lyrics from John Mayer’s song “In the Blood” incapsulates how I felt at the time – even though I could not have told you then why I felt the way I did.

How much of my mother has my mother left in me?
How much of my love will be insane to some degree?
And what about this feeling that I’m never good enough?
Will is wash out in the water?
Or is it aways in the blood?

How much of my father am I destined to become?
Will I dim the lights inside me just to satisfy someone?
Will I let this woman go or do away with jealous love?
Will it wash out in the water?
Or is it always in the blood?

How much like my brothers do my brothers want to be?
Does a broken home become another broken family?
Or will we be there for each other like nobody ever could?
Will it wash out in the water
Or is it always in the blood?

I was scared.  I wanted to run as far away as I could from that life.  I treated it like some kind of disease that I was infected with – like the black plague. If I could just stay away, I would not get infected again. The problem was that this approach kept me from my mom.

The good news is that at the age of 31 my mom would meet Vernon. Life got so much better for her, and for us.  Originally from Rocky Mount, Vernon Pendergrass was an eastern North Carolina redneck. He came to Louisa to work on the new Nuclear Power Plant as a welder.

And he was evidently very good at what he did.  He was a man of few words.  The following lyrics by John Prine in the song “Angel from Montgomery” and made popular by Bonnie Raitt describes Vernon. “How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?” That was Vernon. But unlike my dad or the previous men mom dated, Vernon had integrity. He was a quiet man who brought some stability and dignity into our lives.  Mom especially needed that.  He was also wiser than I gave him credit for.  For example, he never pretended to be our dad.  However, when Elizabeth and I had children of our own, he treated them like his blood grandchildren. 

Shortly after Vernon and mom met each other, he moved in with us.  They would never marry.  But they would stay together until he died in 2009 at the age of 69 – for 35 years.  He always treated my mom well. And for that, I was always grateful to the man who I would eventually think of as my father. And mom loved him so much.

And college, my life became very busy with career, church, raising the kids and developing my own community.  I did not visit my mother as much as I should have.  To show her how much I loved her, I did things like buy her a car, pay off her mortgage, and invite her to travel on vacations with us, which she refused because she did not like to travel. But all she really wanted was more time with me.  If she were a poet, she would have written something similar to the following to me – written by Joan Baez.

I hear the wild dogs in the dark
I hear the wind out in the pines
But there’s no travel near or far
Without the crossing of my mind
And the reflection in your eyes
Shows a road outstretched before you
And if you really want to go
Be of good heart evermore.

I don’t know nothing about where you’re going
That don’t mean a thing to me
I have secrets you don’t know
And you have scars that I can’t read
I know our past ain’t far behind
I hear it knocking on your door
And if you really want to go
Be of good heart evermore.

Mom, you taught me how to be a good man. And with the help of a lot of people, I have been of good heart for much of my life.  Happy Birthday.

Your oldest son,

Johnny