Honour Your Mother and Father
I read a FB post recently written by my friend Tabitha Montgomery, in which she recalled her love and grief for her Mother. I asked her for permission to reprint her short essay.
Home Again
A Short Grief Essay
Tabitha Montgomery
It's been said that when
we lose our parents, it's
like not being able to ever
go home again
If course that's not entirely
how every person feels it.
We don't get to choose our
parents and to those who've
felt deep estrangement, it's
your right and not for anyone
else to presume otherwise.
I wasn't close to my Dad but
it would have been nice had
he stayed well but he didn't.
My biggest fear growing up
Was to lose my Mother.
She had a health scare
When I was little and she
ended up in the hospital
She had surgery of which
I was too young to understand .
It terrified little me.
All I remember was how happy
I felt when she was home again.
Growing up and into my teen years
my Mother did her best to grip the
realities of watching me descend
into a life too soon for a teenager.
A young life with drugs, alcohol
and all that drags along with it.
I wasn't addicted but I was selfish
for awhile. I took her own fears of
losing me for granted. I didn't mean to.
But I grew out of that and grew into
a different person yet someone I feel
like I've known all of my life to this day.
My biggest fear was realized when my
Mother died suddenly one day when I
myself had become a Mother and it
took me years to grieve and grasp all
I had left of her until I realized that I'd
made it through her death and many
other pains, without because I was a
lot like my Mother. She is the someone
I partly grew into. We are a lot alike.
With the love and revelation, reflections
and memories, my grief gently receded
into my heart.
It felt like I was and am, home again.
#Losingaparent
#parentless
#GriefWriting
#Photobooth
#timecapsule
#IwilllovemyMomforever
I wrote to Tabitha to ask for her permission to quote her short essay.
I read your wonderful piece this morning for your Mother. I want to write a longer response, and am asking your permission to reprint it in its entirety for my blog This Is Not Music!
I have yet to write my response, but it will be a meditation on the word honour, as in Honour Your Mother and Father.
I don’t consider myself a Christian, but having been brought up that way, certain phrases come immediately to mind.
The words that came to me were Honour Thy Father and Mother.
I looked up the word honour and read the many translations, and meanings of the word.
Every word we use is a choice, consciously or unconsciously. Some words have great power and significance; this power and significance comes from our experiences in life, and most importantly, how we reflect upon them as we grow.
Your words, chosen with such love, respect and kindness, seem like the light I needed this morning.
Whichever way you decide, thank you for your memories and art in which you express them.
Tabitha responded: Good Morning Dennis, Thank you for this note and asking permission to reprint it on your Blog. I would be honored and I used that word intentionally. Honour has so much value and to me, it's a hand over my heart's value and action. So much of who we are has been either nurtured and or guided by love. Even hurtful times in love. I think parents have long been pressured to be of value to their kids but have had to ensure a lot of pains to grow. It's admitting it and staying with the love I learned from my Mother's that to this day keeps me grounded through life's ups and downs.
I love that the symbol of love is a heart and our homes are where the heart is. Metaphorically the baseline to feelings of belonging and being loved. Writing from the heart has proven that our life lessons and passages as are always there inside of us.
I appreciate you connecting to my share and I think that's why we both relate to one another's writing because we are honestly writing from our spiritual homes, our hearts and that is not religious, that is the human condition. All of it uniquely our own experience.
It is strange that Tabitha has become a very good friend, because if we ever met in person, it was many years ago, and my memory fails me. And yet, we are close. Tabitha reached out to me a number of years back, as my writing had resonated with her. Over this time, we conversed in private on Messenger. She has written over this time about her experiences working in a chocolate shop, not so much the working part, but the daily encounters that she has had with her customers.
Her writing is a personal voice that comes from her heart, from a place of grief over the loss of not just her parents, but the many friends she has lost to the scourge of drugs, the overdose and poisoning that continues to ravage our community.
Tabitha speaks of “when we lose our parents, it's like not being able to ever go home again.” She says, she “made it through her ( mother’s) death and many other pains,” ….”because I was a lot like my Mother. She is the someone I partly grew into. We are a lot alike.”
I know what she means with the statement “ it's like not being able to ever go home again” but when I lost my parents, some eleven years apart, I didn’t feel alone. I felt that I carried them both within me. I felt how their experiences shaped who they were, and how their experiences shaped who I became.
When I became a parent myself, I was confronted with many of the same choices they had to make. I didn’t always walk in their large footsteps, but the path they walked before me was clear to me. There were times in life when new paths are needed. My choices were influenced heavily with the choices my partner made, by her family and her experiences growing up. I feel that Tabitha shares this influence of her partner on her life and path.
Even though I wasn’t a carbon copy of my parents, the black carbon was there. My brother once said that he didn’t feel like a black sheep in his family. He felt there were not any white sheep. When I was young, my mother burnt the toast. She scraped off the burnt parts, and said eat it. The carbon is good for you. Likewise their choices informed who they were, and how they grew up. And like Tabitha and I, their union most likely helped them to grow and create their own path, separate from the journeys of their parents before them.
After a while, part of the process of growing up is to create the “you” that you are meant to be. Call it intentional living, or intentional parenting. We make our own choices but we can’t forget the choices our parents made, even if we are unconscious of those choices.
Let’s presume they made some mistakes. Some behaviour was not ideal. We don’t have to accept everything that came before. We can build our life on the parts that resonate for us, and with intention, discard the parts that no longer work. There are days when I look in the mirror and see them both looking back at me. I see their imprint in my face. I am conscious that it is their blood that beats in my heart. With that strange realization, I remember a moment, and I am taken back to a time that is long past.
We all have different experiences growing up. Some people grow up in situations that are horrific, situations I cannot begin to understand. They are sinew in an old muscle that has lived many lives. They go so far down the rage road, running from the life they started from, and one night, as they sit in the dark, they say how did I get here? Where could I have made better choices? They are not comforted by this realization. Being different than their parents is not enough.
The road they walk upon and the road that their parents walked upon before them was a muddy road, a road full of pools of blood, bad blood. How did the blood go bad? I once asked a landlord about his son. He said “Oh Warren is in the hospital. His blood went all greasy from the health food he was eating.” The landlord did not mention that his son was an alcoholic with a bleeding ulcer. Maybe his blood did go greasy.
We don’t have to agree with our parents. We do not have to follow their path. We can carve our own monuments in butter on a blistering hot day. We don’t have to love our parents, partially or unconditionally.
But we have to honour them for being the two people who brought us into this weird world. Does honour mean to love? Not necessarily. Honour means to give respect. This honour that I speak of is not religious. This honour is the human condition. All of us uniquely living our own experience, choosing our own paths, building our own roads.
It is hard work to repair the potholes of generational pain. Honour means to fulfill your obligations, to respect the past that brought you to this moment, where you fulfill your side of this agreement. In some cases, the obligation is to leave your parents behind. The agreement is to never speak of them. That isn’t my experience, but for some folks it is.
We can honour the spark that started the fire, and at the same time, say I’m not going play with matches. If choosing our words is important, and it is very important, then we need to change the word honour to acknowledge. Say I acknowledge your presence in my life, but I choose to be something different, something better.
The acknowledgement fulfills your obligation. The acknowledgement frees us to honour our own choices. To honour the fact that we all have choices. For some, the best choice is just to remember that they started from one place, and through their own will, they are now in a better place than where they started.
In that seed of awareness, our parents, our mothers and fathers are remembered, and acknowledged, and the long process of reconciling memories has begun.
Memories are put in perspective, used only as a starting point. When we search for the honour in our relationships, we find the only honour is in moving forward.