mother's day

Years ago, when I was about 8 or so, mom was driving my sisters and I home from the 16th Street Meijers. It had been one of those fun, summertime trips to the grocery store: my sister Laura and I fought and argued and bickered up and down every single aisle and Jeanne just sat in the cart with the food, wailing and sobbing because she had been forced to leave the light of her life--a stuffed Donald Duck--in the car. Basically, by the time we were done, had paid our bill and had some poor sap load our stuff in the car, I think God was even getting a little sick of us.

Well, mom tossed us into our seats and peeled out of the parking lot with every intention of getting home as quickly as possible. As the car lurched and raged through the little maze of stop signs and turns looking desperately for open road and a straight shot home, Laura and I smoothly transitioned into Phase 2 of our fight. This was the "make derogatory, deeply personal remarks about the other person and follow them up with slapping" stage. I was very good at this part of the fighting process and I was just getting into my groove when mom boiled over. She turned around quickly, the vinyl seats of her little Gremlin squeaking with the sudden movement, and she looked us all in the eye for a second and said, "I don't want to hear another word . . . not even a breath . . . out of any of you the rest of the way home or there's going to be BIG trouble."

Well, normally threats didn't work on us, but this time she seemed serious--and honestly, a little crazy. Her right eye was twitching and her left shoulder kept jerking up toward her ear involuntarily. It was kind of scary and we thought for a second that maybe we had broken her. But eventually the twitching slowly stopped and we decided not to push things any farther. Despite our intentions of finishing the fight with a grand finale on the ride home, we settled quietly into the back seats and clenched our mouths tightly closed--even though we continued throwing angry glances back and forth at each other.

During the remainder of that ride, the only one that made any noise at all was Jeanne--and she was making happy sounds. See, once she got in the car, she was reunited with her stuffed Donald Duck and she was all babbly happiness. As I've mentioned before, that toy was the light of her world. It was a toy upon which, in Jeanne's estimation, the sun rose and set. Without that drool-stained duck tucked under her arm, Jeanne couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't laugh. Now, with that toy back in her possession, she wasn't quiet, but at least she was happy.

In fact, she was a little too happy. She was in that babbling stage where kids say all kinds of stuff you can't quite understand and you get tired just listening and trying to figure it out. You know that stage, right? That stage when they wear parents down to little nubs of the people they had once been simply by dribbling a non-stop stream of unintelligible questions out of their mouths. Anyway, Jeanne was in that stage and she sat in the back seat and beat mom into a coma with unending nonsense. In fact as we pulled away from the stoplight on James and 31--right by Dutch Village, heading North, Jeanne was really going and mom's eyes were glazed over. Jeanne was gabbing a garbled mouthful of things in which mom could only understand snippets. However, as her little Gremlin maxed out at a shaky 55 mph, two lines of clear speech snaked their way through the jumble and into mom's brain. Two simple lines cleared the glazed film off mom's eyes and sounded warning bells in her head. Two simple fragments of a single sentence: "Donald's a good flyer" and "he really likes the wind."

The import of what Jeanne was saying sunk into mom's brain and her eyes darted from the road to the rearview mirror and her mouth fell open. Sure enough, windmilling down the center of US 31 behind our non-eco-friendly, oil-burning Gremlin, was Donald Duck.

Mom whipped around in her seat for a better view--probably hoping that what she had seen in the mirror was just a mirage--a hallucination produced by the stress of having children with her all the time. Anyway, she whipped around in the squeaky vinyl seat and continued pushing her Gremlin toward home, all the while watching Donald flip over and over on the concrete. It was about that time that Jeanne realized Donald was gone for good. Her eyes crackled and she threw her curly red head back against the seat and sounded a long, mournful, ear-piercing wail like a wounded rabbit.

Of course, when that started, everything escalated--isn't it funny how that added touch of shrieking can lace even the most simple scenario with a feeling of impending doom, of hellish torment, of razor-edged tension? Yes, children know this and they use it to their every advantage. As an aside, smart parents know this as well. I, for example, if I have to return a particular electronic thingy I've purchased--and if I believe it's going to be one of those episodes where the "customer service" people argue with me about the return--if I know that's possibly going to happen, I bring one of the kids--usually the crabbiest one at the time--along with me. Most often it's Tessa. Well, if I put my little package on the counter and the tattooed and pierced high school girl beyond the counter looks at my receipt and says "this has only a 14 day return policy", I instantly pull the candy bar Tessa's been holding since we got there, out of her hands and there you go--instant anger. She'll start to wail and I have to say "what? I can't hear you" to the girl behind the counter while I point at my ears and shake my head. Then she repeats herself and I just shake my head and point at my ears again and pretend to tell Tessa to keep quiet. Eventually, the girl gets sick of repeating herself and the ear-splitting wails eventually wear her down and she just punches through the return and gives me my money back. Tessa always leaves the store--after a successful return--with a candy bar or two.

Anyway, all that to say children can really crank things up a notch or two when they start the screaming. And that's what Jeanne was doing at that exact moment that Donald was cartwheeling along the dashed lines of Northbound 31.

Well, with the screaming, mom was having a hard time thinking--a difficult time working out a plan--so she did what comes natural to parents across the ages: she turned on the other kids--on us. Pointing a crooked little finger at Laura and I, she asked "Did you see her throw Donald out the window?" We both nodded.

"Well, then, why didn't you say something?"

Oh, let me tell you, that even as a 6 year old kid, this was a sweet moment that I thoroughly enjoyed. Well, I cleared my throat, paused for effect and said, "You know, you told us to keep our mouths shut the whole way home." I'm surprised I'm still alive. I guess she had too many other things going on to worry about pounding me into next week.

After a few seconds delay--a moment of biting her lip and trying to decide on a course of action while Jeanne continued shrieking in the back seat--mom set her jaw and swung the car violently into a Michigan turn. She hit the gas, moved through the light, heading South now and then hit another Michigan turn. Our tires squeeled and before too many seconds had passed, we were sitting at the light, heading North once again.

In front of us, sprawled on the highway, lay Donald. When the light turned green, mom hit the gas and I'd like to say that the car peeled away from the rest of traffic. Yeah, I'd like to say that, but mom was driving a Gremlin. Still, it was moving faster than we were accustomed to and I remember our overly-large little kid heads sinking deep into the backs of our seats. Then, before we knew what had happened, mom hit the brakes and yanked the car into the median. Next thing we knew, her door flew open and she was gone, booking it across the highway, dodging and running at a full sprint straight toward the oncoming traffic. It was like a suicide run--like an extreme game of chicken--and Laura and I had never seen anything like it. Horns were blaring, mom was dodging, Jeannie was crying and we were cheering. We knew right then that if mom was going to die today she was going to do it with style.

Way too soon, (as far as we were concerned), mom was back in the car, panting and sweating and shaking. She tossed Donald into the back seat--into Jeannie's open arms--and leaned back to roll Jeanne's window all the way up. She didn't say a word as she nosed the car back onto the highway--she was breathing too hard. She had faced near certain death to recover a stuffed toy that we could have bought again at Meijers for 10 bucks. Why? I have no idea. All I can think is that she did it because she's a mom. And that's what moms do. They bend over backward for their familes and they do whatever it takes to please them, protect them, or sometimes, just to shut them up.

Today's Mother's Day and I thought I'd take a minute to say thanks to all the moms out there and to a few who've impacted me in particular.

Thanks mom for all you've done to "raise us in the way we should go." Thanks for doing everything in your power to protect us and teach us and love us and thanks for doing the crazy stuff like running onto the highway, straight at a semi-truck, to grab that stupid little stuffed Donald for Jeanne. It made a great story--(though think how much better it would have been if you'd been clipped--just winged, mind you--by one of those trucks . . . . Oh, well, we can't rewrite the past . . . .)

Thanks to Tam's mom for doing all she's done to raise Tam and to be there for us.

And finally, thanks to my wife--the mother of our (gulp) 5 kids. Tam, you're the best mom I've ever seen. When God put your heart together, He had to be thinking "I've got one thing in mind for her--one thing that will be the pulse of her life." That one thing is motherhood.

In a day and age when so many people look at that job--at being a mom--as something you do and then move on from as quickly as you can . . . in a day when so many people are primarily concerned about keeping their careers . . . in a day and age when being a mom is cool, but where we're constantly telling women you can (and should) be much more than a mom . . . in a day and age like that, you're a breath of fresh air. You're amazing to me because you don't believe any of that garbage. You've figured things out and you know that there is nothing more important--no higher career or bigger calling--than the job you're doing right now: raising our kids to love God, to follow Jesus and to love life and each other. Years and years down the road, I don't think we'll look back and miss the money you could have made. I don't think we'll look back and wish you had spent more time furthering your education so you'd be more marketable in the business world. I think we'll look back and thank God that He put that special something in your heart when He made you--that special love that makes you the most remarkable mom and woman I've ever had the privilege to know.

Thank you from all of us--from Caleb, Madi, Andrew, Tessa, Hannah and me.