Women's Village News Charges of sexism, racism fly in presidential race EU proposes minimum maternity leave of 18 weeks ND abortion clinic says it could set record Fly fishing courses get women on the water Palin a challenge to So. Baptist view of women Specials Expanded Job Tools Section New QuickSearches by location and industry, salary tools, more at the Career Center Graduate School Opportunities Channel What's New with the IMDiversity site

A Good Mom’s Lessons Are Hard to Forget

Writer's mom dies at age 77

By David Pego, Native American Village

My mother only wanted to go in one direction -- a straight line.

That's the way she lived her life, which recently ended at age 77. Our family and her friends buried her on Valentine's Day. For a woman whose heart was filled with love for others, it was a most appropriate day for her funeral.

Mom didn't want to go anywhere but in the right direction. A minister's wife and school teacher, she had taught herself to read English using a Catholic Bible as a grade-school girl in the Michigan north woods. Through her lifetime, the Bible became moral compass and her best friend. She would turn the other cheek, but only so far. As a young girl, she learned to stand up for herself. That was a natural thing to do with one sister and four brothers -- especially when two of those brothers wound up in Ring Magazine's Top 10 ratings of world-ranked boxers and fought in Madison Square Garden.

I benefited from Mom's hardscrabble upbringing -- like the day I came home with blood all over my torn shirt and she asked if I had been in a fight.

"So, you're a fighter," she said. "Let me see you hold your hands."

Looking at my fists

I held them up, fingers barely curled over and thumbs on each hand sticking wide out. Thinking back, I probably looked more like a cat ready to swat a toy. And that's how I had fought that day.

As I began to tell the story a few days ago at my mom's wake, all of my cousins laughed. I never knew they hard been told the story by my uncle. My mom must have delighted in the memory of teaching her son to stand up for himself and fight.

"You're going to get your thumbs broken that way," she said, looking at my hands again. "Hold them this way."

She tucked my thumbs in and curled my hands into hard little blocks of flesh and bone.

"Mom, where did you learn this?"

My mom, the fighter

That's the first time she explained to me that she had spent hours in a makeshift boxing ring under grey Michigan skies, sparring with her Golden Gloves champion boxers. There were few other young people who lived near the home where my grandfather, the lumberjack, and grandmother had raised mom and the rest. And if they did live close, few wanted to trade punches with my boxing uncles. So, mom stepped up to the challenge.

She wasn't quite as fearless on the highway. I wasn't kidding about her only wanting to go in one direction -- straight ahead. Through the years, she helped my dad drive on long trips, such as when we would travel from the mission fields in New Mexico or Oklahoma and go home to Michigan. She never had a driver's license -- only a learner's permit that she kept renewing. Dad would drive through a large city, then once we got a few miles out of town -- where a straight stretch of 200 or so miles was next -- they would stop the car and trade places so Dad could catch a couple hours rest.

Mom was full of prayer and care for others. Before she earned a college degree when she was 46 years old, she took humble jobs in which she could serve others. She was a waitress, a hospital aide, a nursing home attendant -- always serving others. And that's probably why she became a teacher when she finally earned enough college hours to qualify for the classroom. And she continued in school until she finally got a master's degree in education at age 62.

"Serve the Lord and serve others, David," she would tell me. It was advice I often tried to ignore through the years but her resolve kept ringing in my stubborn and seemingly empty head.

A lifetime of prayer

She was a woman who would spend hours -- sometimes the better part of a full day -- talking privately to the Lord in small, humble churches where my dad was pastor. She prayed for me, for our family, and for the world. She prayed in English and sometimes in her native Ottawa Indian language.

And she kept praying even when she went into a full-time care facility about 13 years ago because of Parkinson's disease and through the time, three years later, when her body no longer responded to the outside world. For nearly 10 years, her body became her prison but her faith, I believe, was her salvation. I've never seen anything like it -- nor heard of faith like hers in the real world. Nor had her caretakers who marveled at the woman who had prayed audibly for hours until she could no longer speak.

She taught me to do remarkable things because I believed I could. She helped me get my first library card when I was four and soon I was hauling a red wagon to the small library with a stack full of books. And she gave me so much confidence that a year later, I managed to enroll myself in kindergarten when the school first started and she was late returning for her overnight waitress job. At age six, my faith led me to pray for an Easter bunny and somehow a brown bunny slipped into our chain-link fenced back yard. I called Mom to see and she just nodded thoughtfully. A few minutes later, it was gone though no hole in the fence was present in the back yard.

I witnessed miracles and I know I saw an angel once, because of the physical evidence and circumstances of that early Sunday morning visit. I've tried my best to put that out of my mind and chalk it off as something perfectly ordinary, but I never could, no matter how much I tried to ball up my fists and fend off my mom's pointed verbal jabs, telling me it was time to serve someone and to make this a better world.

Mom is my inspiration

She is why I do what I do. I believe in giving without expectation of return. I believe in helping others. And I believe in listening to my mom at long last.

On the day she was buried, it was overcast. But suddenly a large hole in the clouds opened up over the east-southeast skies where the sun had risen that morning. Through it poured large beams of sunlight.

It was the way she had described to me how she believed it would be when her spirit finally rose up to heaven.

Once again, mom was right. I should have never doubted her. She went in a straight line one last time.