Happy Birthday, Mom, from a reader named Marla
January 21, 2008 | stories
Yesterday my sister and her family, my brother and his family, and I sat in church with my mom. She turned 70 on January 20th and one of the birthday surprises was to show up at her church.
She cried all the way through service, and they were good tears.
The pastor prayed a dismissal prayer, and my parents were out of there as if shot out of a cannon. I smiled, looking around at my parent’s social adult kids and grandchildren ready to shake hands and meet people, while mom and dad stood by the door of their home church, poised to fly out the door.
We are so different, my parents and I, but I digress. . .
As I watched my mom’s happiness yesterday, I couldn’t help but also think about her pain. There were a lot of years that she felt lost.
Writing “The Mom I Want to Be: Rising Above Your Past to Give Your Children a Great Future” was a risk for me. Minister to many, but destroy her in the process? Not a fair trade, and not one I was willing to risk.
When she found out that I was asked to do the project, she asked me to pursue it, and I asked her to come on board. My mom–pregnant at 15, never graduated high school–blew me away with her insight. She sent lots of e-mails, some of them pages long, with her story and her hopes and her regrets.
Two weeks ago I was at church and a woman turned to me. “You look familiar,” she said.
The woman with her said, “This is Suzie Eller. She wrote that book we are studying.”
The two friends are in rehab. They are studying The Mom I Want to Be with their counselor.
“Where is she?” the first woman asked. “Where is your mom?”
“She lives in Tulsa,” I said.
She told her her name. Marla. “Will you do something for me,” she said. “Will you give your mom a hug and tell her it’s from Marla?”
Marla is working through healing and forgiveness and learning how to be a good mom. She told me that she identified with my mom’s writing, eagerly anticipating the one-page lead-in at the beginning of each chapter.
Marla lost her children last year. Her prayer is not only to heal from her own childhood, but to get her children back and be the mom she wants to be.
It was these words penned by my mom that changed her heart and helped her to take one important step toward that dream:
One day I was watching TV. A woman tried to get her daughter to forgive her for things that happened when her daughter was younger. The daughter wanted nothing to do with her. The mother was devastated. She was sorry for her wrongs and couldn’t go on with her life because of the situation with her daughter.
I listened a little closer. The mom’s name was Karen, just like mine. The thought came to me–I felt the Holy Spirit show me that I had not found 100-percent healing because I hadn’t accepted responsibility–no matter what the circumstances were–for what happened when my children were young.
I messed up. It wasn’t on purpose. Humans make mistakes, but subsconsiously I thought that because I didn’t purposely mess up as a parent, it shouldn’t be counted against me. So I never really took responsibility for my actions. If I didn’t take responsibility, then I was an okay person, I thought.
This opened my eyes. My daughter loved me and had forgiven me. It was time to forgive myself. But it was also time to look at the past (the way I had parented) with my children in a way that it should be viewed. It was a new way of thinking.
This passage helped Marla take an important step toward healing and reconciliation with her children.
I promised Marla that I would tell my mom, and I did, and my mother cried all over again.
So today I want to say, “Happy birthday, mom, not just from me, but from all the women whose lives you have touched by sharing your story. I’m proud that I’m your daughter.”
Suzie
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