There was a moment
when I realized that my mother had let me go.
It came twenty years after I had walked away.
I remember
vividly sitting down in my first desk on my first day in first grade. I was eager to go, because my brother Danny
had, for the past year, left in the morning for school, leaving me to wonder
what it was like. So here it was. School.
I went to the desk that Sister Dorita, the kind old nun, had pointed me
to and sat down, smiling to myself proudly.
I looked at my mom talking with the sister, and for a long time I’ve
known what they were talking about. The
price of wings.
Twenty years
or so later, I had swept into my mom and dad’s house with my wife and three
kids and all of the stuff that came with us on the road from Detroit, where I’d
moved for college, and stayed for life.
While my sisters and my dad settled in the living room with Kathy and
the kids, my mom and I sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee. I don’t know if she pointed me to sit down
there as Sister Dorita had to that first desk, but I’ll never forget the
conversation. It was about wings.
“Johnny, how
did you get to be this way,” she asked.
“What do you
mean, mom?”
“You’re so
different than you were when you lived at home….”
I knew she meant that I had become more. The university
had made me bigger than I had been at home with her and my dad. Kathy had given me not only love and
children, but a sense of myself as part McGuyver (who could figure out how to
solve problems) and Robert Young, who had played the TV father who “knows best.” I had grown into someone she could not have
imagined. And I had grown 300 miles
away.
In Advent,
we wait for Christmas, but it might be worthwhile to consider young Mary large
with child. Perhaps her cousin Elizabeth
had been for her the equivalent of my brother Danny, making her as eager for
the birth of her first child as I had been for first grade.
Yesterday I had a conversation with a young mother about wings. She was feeling the cost of them.
I’ve
reflected, since that conversation, not about Mary large with the child Jesus,
but about Naucrete, the mother of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the
sun. While the father of Icarus who had
crafted the wings (Daedalus was a kind of a McGuyver himself) for his son was a
member of the Court of King Minos, Icarus’ mother was a slave. How appropriate. Aren’t all mothers slaves to the aspirations
of their children? Don’t all mothers
slave their lives away to pay the price of a gift they’d rather not buy…wings…
for their children?
As we approach Christmas, all of us born of
mothers might consider our own, and the gift they have given us, these wings, to
become different than we were when we were living at home, to become bigger,
and perhaps to grow farther away, closer to our suns, dreaming not merely of
lifting ourselves in the freedom of flight, but lifting the poor into the
freedom of dignity and lifting the lost into the belovedness of relationship.
