from Personal Essays on Fear

To Be Loved

I t’s a valuable thing to know that you are loved. I’ve seen married couples, for instance, who seem madly in love with one another. They seem to find comfort and ease in their love and do not have to spend time wondering, doubting their partner’s love. This frees their minds for higher or more necessary pursuits, surely, such as building a precious family or vigorously taking part in a community’s well-being and growth. Again, their every thought is not wasted, wondering, fearing that they are not loved.

It is said that children who grow up seeing their parents in a loving relationship learn how to be in those types of relationships themselves. They can see themselves one day being loved as well. I think back to my mother, and although she seemed capable of happiness—a smile often coated her facial expression—there must have been incredible doubt that my father loved her. He claimed that he did. He passionately swore that he did. He seemed to need to state that he did love my mother.

There were signs of this love: their hasty marriage on Valentine’s Day 1948; his complete love of her cooking and other qualities; his lifelong desire to marry her again—the second time, done the right way, in a church, with everyone watching. Perhaps signs like these became markers of hope for my mother and gave her a type of minor strength that got her through the dark moments. Perhaps these signs afforded her relief from the doubts, the constant wondering and worrying about being loved.

My father said he was at once smitten with my mother. He often described the double-dates with him and my mother, and his brother, my

Uncle Jake, and my mother’s sister, my Aunt Mary.

“I just wanted to be close to her,” he would say. “All of us crowded into Jake’s old truck, and she’d have to sit on my lap the whole time. Boy, I liked that!”

I think of it now that all of them are long dead and I am getting older myself. My father was almost thirty years old when he became “smitten” with my mother, who was only fourteen years at the time. Yes, she had birthed a child at thirteen; yes, she was tall and looked mature; and yes, in those mid-twentieth century years, marriage for a girl of my mother’s age was not frowned upon, even to a man who was twice her age. But when I think of it now, I recognize that he was a grown man fiddling around with a child.

One of my favorite pictures of my mother is of she and I sitting on her front porch. She had paid local friends of my brothers to build the porch one spring afternoon—using old wood, propping it up with old stones, a little spit and a lot of beer. They had been kind enough to screen the porch so that mosquitoes would not be a problem on late summer afternoons when my mother often sat out there, catching a breeze, and somehow finding peace.

The photo seems rare, like the moment. She is sitting in a large chair, and I am sitting on the arm of that chair, with one arm around her shoulder. We are both smiling, almost laughing. She brought that kind of joy into my world. I could count on it, like death and taxes, as they say. The afternoon shade of the trees lay silently on the floor and cools the moment, even now, in my memory. Absolutely no one else is in the photo—these are clearly happy moments that she and I shared. But when I look at the photo now, I ask myself how she did it—how did she take the hard times my father gave her and make a seemingly joyous life out of them?

When I was very young—so young I cannot imagine my age—I woke from a bad dream and went to my mother and father’s bed, as I usually did when frightened. I did not find them there and went in search, of my mother in particular. When I opened the door to the living room (from the kitchen), I saw, in the darkness, two huddled forms, on the couch, making weird noises. I must have thought my mother was in trouble because I called out to her, “Momma!”

The noises stopped, so did the movement.

“Get outta here!” my father yelled.

My mother may have said something softer, like “Go back to bed,” but the shock of my father’s voice had already turned me around. The fact that I can still remember the incident suggests I was truly traumatized by it.

I’m also not sure what this means, or why it has become part of this sketch on “love.” Probably because I have asked myself, at least once or twice, over the years, whether my mother was enjoying herself, or was this one of the many late nights when my father came home drunk, ready to collect on his rights as a husband.

What do I think? I think my parents had a lot of children. And the times when my mother was not “barefoot and pregnant,” at least one of his other women was carrying his children, too.

I think part of it is that there are many kinds of love. Like love of self, of others. There is love of one’s creation, of those birthed into the world, no matter the strain or ease of those births. I see my mother’s thankfulness at being given so many children by God: she birthed ten children, and also raised the girl child of her sister Josephine, who died in a car accident. I see my mother’s unabated love and appreciation for God’s gift of children.

I think about animal mothers and their offspring. The things they do to protect their young: the nourishing, the sharing, the instruction. Most impressive is the all-out adoration of those children. I am often amazed when I visit the zoo, or when I watch the many HGTV shows about animals. I am amazed at the lengths they will go as mothers. Growing up on our farm, we had a sow that would try to kill you if you even looked at her piglets. What about those species whose mothers kill the father to protect the young? And ah, mythology, and all those protective mothers.

Down to her last breath, my mother was probably thinking of her children. She had so many, and yet had lost three (Anna as a baby, Lionel a few years before she died, and Willie barely a year before my mother’s death). Perhaps she wanted to keep the rest of us close. Those early morning phone calls, to each of us, are what I miss the most.

That photo of us on the porch tells me that I brought some joy to her that day. I had probably driven from New Orleans just to hang out with her. The thing is, I loved sitting on that porch as much as she did. There is something about basking in the shade of a porch, especially on a warm day—looking out on the world, imagining only goodness. That’s where our smiles likely came from: she and I talking about good things in life. Us laughing about some oddity or happenstance. Us sharing our optimism—despite the horror that may have been lurking.

Sometimes, I think we are fated for one life only. We like to think we could have chosen the road not taken, as Frost says, but is that true?

I do not think my mother’s life was destined to be sunny-side-up, rosy, and without extreme hardships. She was born during depression era America. She worked in the fields, from sunup to sundown, and this did not change until she was well past middle age. She was not allowed to finish elementary school. She bore a child as a child. She was chosen for marriage—which must have seemed like things were finally looking up—by a man who would later show that same type of attention to the child she birthed out of wedlock.

She struggled alongside him all the rest of the days of her life, always trying to make ends meet, never quite sure of the next dollar. She literally fought him—fisticuffs style—on many occasions, either to keep him from hitting her, or to keep him away from her eldest child, who would grow to fight him, too. She turned her face from his philandering ways. She learned how to grow up and become a strong woman, to make her own money—because he was stingy with his. Her children, namely me and my sister, Venesta, felt so badly about this that when we joined the military, we monthly sent home a third of our pay so that she could better take care of herself and the children still at home.

All of this and more, leads me to believe there was no other, less oppressed life for my mother. What does that mean to me, today? Am I secretly praying that her next life will be better, that her turn will come? Yes, I am.

Then I think, that woman could surely laugh. Joy was something she was most familiar with. She went about helping people like her life depended on her doing so. She could talk up a conversation with even the most sullen, least friendly. She knew how to work hard and didn’t mind doing so. She taught her children to work as hard. She could goof off just as easily. Her house wasn’t always clean, but there was always an opportunity for fun—a run to the local store for snacks and cold drinks, for example. There was always food on the table, at suppertime, breakfast, and lunch. She was a devoted church woman, singing in the choir, ushering, teaching. And she pushed us, her children, to learn everything we could. When I was the first to graduate from college, she was the happiest I had ever seen her. She literally told everyone she knew, as well as everyone she met on the street. Sure, she had very little “learning,” as she said, but she now had a daughter who was smart and capable, in ways she had only imagined. I was the living prize that she could share.

Later in their lives together, my father came to the VA in New Orleans to have cataract surgery. In those days, he and my mother were inseparable. He had slowed down, learned how to be more appreciative as a husband, and turned specifically to God. She therefore came to New Orleans with him and spent the night at my apartment. Gosh, I was proud, to have my mother all to myself.

Sometimes, I wish I remembered every last second of that night— perhaps had a hidden camera, immortalizing those rare moments. If only I’d known she would be dead in a matter of years—years that now seem like months, days. I know that, after we left my father at the hospital, she and I spent most of the evening talking. I know that I stepped all over myself trying to please her, making sure she was comfortable and that she wanted nothing. I can’t remember what we ate—probably one of my specialties, like porcupine balls,1 which were popular with me back then. My mother didn’t drink, so we did not have wine, even though I probably had a bottle in the fridge. I would have had sweet tea available. When we were finally tired enough to sleep, I had to convince my mother to take the bed and I would take the sofa. I was especially happy that my mother would have the chance to sleep in my large, king bed (she and my father shared a standard-sized bed their entire married lives). I imagined she would roll around in the large bed and frolic the night away, that she would have the best night of sleep she had ever had. I know, silly. But I gotta say, that was definitely the best night I ever slept on a sofa. We woke up, ate breakfast, and drove back to the hospital in my little sports car. She wasn’t all that familiar with the New Orleans streets, and she was a little scared as I sped through the city. I am sure I slowed down, at least a bit. When we arrived at my father’s room, he lay there easily, waiting for the eye surgery. He smiled a lot in those days; he found a way to joke about his chances. When my mother went over to his bed, I could see his face light up, as it often did in those days when she was near. I’m sure he had missed her that night. I am sure of it.

Most days, I understand that there are many, many kinds of love. And most days, I know my mother knew she was loved—by my father, by her children, by her friends, and by random people she met on the street. She was that kind of person—someone who deserved to be loved.