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was born on May 10, 1942, 66 years ago yesterday. In that year, May 10
fell on Mother’s Day. Thus, as a Mothers Day baby, I stand before you
uniquely qualified to lead this service today.
My mother, Mary Margaret Sampson Bloom, was born on July 13, 1909. She
died at age 98 this last August 16 in the nursing home in which she had
lived for the last 8 years of her life. Today I want to celebrate her
life with you, and from that singular life make some broader points,
perhaps, about what it means to be a mother.
My mother was born on the farm on which she grew up as an only child,
near Carrington, MO, population maybe a hundred. Carrington, in turn,
was about 8 miles from Fulton, the county seat of Callaway County, MO,
population around 10,000. Her family had been in that county since the
early 1820’s, some of the first white families to settle there.
Mother often commented about how hard the work on the farm was growing
up. There was so much to be done on a farm and, at the time, little
technology to help do it. There was no electricity, only coal oil lamps
lit the night. No running water. The water came from a well in the yard.
The toilet was an outhouse where, she said, the worst part was the snow
sifting through the cracks in the winter. She went to grade school in a
one room school house, grades 1-8 altogether. She rode her pony to
school some of the time, but she complained that after being tied up all
day the pony was so invigorated when she got on him to come home that he
would run and kick up his heels all the way home. She also told another
on the way to school story of being so packed under layers of clothes to
keep warm after a winter storm that she stepped into a hole covered by
the snow and almost couldn’t get out, she couldn’t move. She finally
thrashed around enough to get out.
She loved and cherished her grandparents, her dad’s parents, who lived
on the farm right next door. To put the era of her growing up life in
perspective, her grandfather had been a Confederate soldier in the Civil
War. He was shot in the head by Union soldiers who ambushed a group of
them there in Callaway County. He threw his cloak over his head and
played dead. Because they were low on ammunition, they didn’t want to
waste another bullet to make sure he was gone, so they left him. He was
17 at the time. He then crawled and walked back to a farm where they
helped him. The doctor said the bullet in his head didn’t seem to be in
a dangerous place, so just live with it. Which he did until 1926 when he
died of old age.
Mother’s grandmother, as well as her mother, were both warm and
nurturing country women. That was fairly common at the time for women to
act so. But mother got a bonus of also having a loving, warm, funny,
nurturing dad. Ernest Sampson was a fine, kind man who was a skilled
carpenter, builder, and designer as well as a farmer. Her mother, Madge,
was one of those broad, good hearted souls who gave all for her child
and anyone in need. She is also the person who gave me music, as well as
my mother.
Mother was a shy and sensitive child. Isolation on the farm was hard for
her. She was incredibly naïve by today’s standards. When they moved into
Fulton so she could begin attending high school in the 9th grade, it was
overwhelming for her. Within a year, the family started moving, all
around the country in a change that was very challenging to her. Her dad
had decided to leave the farm and start working for a construction
company, so they went to Canton, MO, then Miami, FL, then Daytona Beach,
FL, from where she graduated from high school and where she had her
first boy friend. Then back to Fulton where she attended William Woods
College (as my Grandmother Bloom and many of the women in our family had
done). Her father insisted on coming back so she could attend college,
getting a contract to oversee the building of the gymnasium at
Westminster College where Winston Churchill would deliver the Iron
Curtain address in 1946. Soon after graduating from William Woods,
mother began to have difficulty breathing. A doctor suggested that the
Colorado climate would help her, so her father got a contract to build
two fraternity houses on the CU campus and they moved to Boulder.
She loved Colorado. She wrote poetry while in Boulder, as a 21 year old,
some of which I would like to share with you.
NATURE’S WAY
As for me, I don’t like the kind of clothes prescribed by the fashion
racket.
My favorite habit for woman or man is trousers, some boots, and a
jacket.
Then off to some secluded spot, by lake or mountain stream,
Where one can find content and peace, and time to think and dream.
No matter how cultured we become, we somehow never tire
Of coffee and crisp sizzling bacon cooked on an open fire.
The great out of doors has a wonderful way of coaxing us to lose
The grouch and frown of yesterday….an antidote for blues.
MOUNTAIN SUNSET
Lengthening shadows of purple and blue,
eastern reflections of roseate hue,
smoke gray clouds piled fold on fold,
tinged with fire of molten gold.
CHALLENGE
If we are near to foothills bare, we do not see beyond their rise,
We can not catch the glimpses fair of tall peaks pointing to the skies.
The bare ideals of lower height do not need obscure your higher view,
When on beyond are peaks of light now waiting to be scaled by you.
In December of 1930, my father arrived in Boulder on the train with an
engagement ring. She happily accepted the proposal.
They were married the next summer and settled down in Fulton. There my
sister, Nancy, and I were born. Nancy was 4 and a half years older than
I. When I was 4, the moving started again. To other small towns in
Missouri, for my dad’s new work. Then we settled down “forever” in
Perry, MO, pop 813, where dad bought an International Harvester Tractor
dealership. Alas, forever turned out to be a little over 2 years. My
father lost his business because of the sudden change in farm policy
wrought by the Republicans in 1953. Many small dealerships went out of
business at the time. Though the bankruptcy laws were invented to be
used in exactly these situations, my father refused to take that route.
He would pay back the last payment on the money he owed a month before
he died, 17 years later.
This was a huge blow to our family. We moved back to Fulton again, tails
between our legs. My mother went back to work, eventually at William
Woods College as the receptionist, switchboard operator, and secretary.
My father was depressed for the rest of his life, though he would never
say that in those words.
My mother suffered. It was not the optimistic, cheerful world that she
had been brought up in, and that she worked so hard to maintain for her
children.
From then on, there was no extra money, ever. We lived very modestly.
The one exception was to take us on a vacation they could not afford in
order to cheer us all up from the financial, personal disaster this was.
That vacation was to Colorado, and is the reason I stand before you
today. My mother still loved Colorado from her time here earlier in her
life. I was now 11, and I LOVED it. I was fascinated by the mountains,
by everything about what we saw and did. Pike’s Peak, Rocky Mt. Nat’l
Park, Frontier Days in Cheyenne. It is why I live here. I never forgot.
The vacation worked some magic as we returned to Missouri with renewed
hope.
This was not the last challenge, of course, for my mother to face. My
sister got pregnant and married. I got into trouble and got kicked out
of high school for a semester. Later, there were other challenges from
both of us that ran counter to how we had been raised. Then my father
became deeply ill with emphysema, and died in the fall of 1970.
My father had been a traditional, take charge, I’ll do it guy. He drove
everywhere they went in the car, he did all the outside work at home, he
kept the family finances and paid the bills and taxes, etc. When he
died, mother felt helpless. She described that time in her informal
personal history addressed to my sister and I. “In the days after Dick’s
death, I went to the cemetery many times. I couldn’t let go. I didn’t
care what I had on or how I looked. I felt ugly, and that was the way I
wanted to feel. I understood what the Bible said about, “heaping ashes
on your head.”
It was during the next year or so, that my mother acted heroically and
became the person I loved even more.
She decided to take a trip in which to face her demons. She had not
driven a car farther than a few miles for many years. She asked her
cousin to go with her and took off on a road trip to Wisconsin and
Minnesota. She drove all 2,200 miles herself. After that experience, she
felt hopeful, much less helpless, and really created a good life for
herself as a whole person. It was a turning point.
I went into treatment for my alcoholism a month after my dad’s death.
From that time on, my mother and I sort of grew up together. Her as a
recovering dependent woman, me as a recovering alcoholic. It was a good
partnership. We each supported and celebrated each other. One year, when
I was living on Cape Cod, I showed up unannounced on her door step in
Fulton on Mother’s Day with a big bouquet. She almost had a heart
attack.
I believe that my mother, and her mother before her, were the living
embodiment of the “good mother.” Now, I don’t mean the embodiment of a
perfect mother, or even a good mother by many other people’s standards.
She was not a feminist, by any stretch of the imagination. What she did
was to embody love and sacrifice for her husband and children. She did,
indeed, set aside her own individual priorities and dreams for her
family many times. But she did so with a clear heart and mind. It was
her choice to do so. In her time, in the culture and place from which
she grew, it could not be otherwise. It pains me when others, and I,
judge other’s actions across time, judge it in hindsight. Each of us
performs our lives in the time in which we are assigned. We come into
the place and culture of that time. For us to look back and judge those
who lived very different values than we do based on what we know NOW is
not fair, or wise. Today Mary Margaret Bloom would quickly be given a
lifetime membership in Co-Dependents Anonymous. She had little vision of
herself as being separate from her husband, her mother, and her
children. Yet, in measuring a life in the ways that truly matter, it was
a good and deeply useful life. Particularly for those of us who received
her unconditional love. Particularly for her children.
Then came her time alone. Her husband died, her mother died two years
later, and her children were grown and gone. Rather than becoming a
depressed recluse, as many do at such times, she grew up in many ways
beginning at age 61, beginning with that trip. She stayed involved with
her church, singing in the choir. She became a board member there. She
was active in other ways in community life. She had a long list of
friends. She visited my sister and us and our kids many times. She
became a happy, high functioning person. She was unfailingly cheerful,
kind, and open hearted as an older widow woman. Even when her health
began to fade, she stayed as positive as anyone I knew had under those
circumstances.
As she began to be in danger of falling, we helped her move from her
small beloved house where she lived for 27 years, “the longest I ever
lived anywhere” she would brag, to an assisted living apartment. Then,
at age 90, she fell in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Her old
habits had not died completely as there she laid until it got light.
Only then she pulled the emergency cord, “because I didn’t want to cause
anybody any trouble by getting them out of bed.” She had broken her hip.
Because of her long lasting rheumatoid arthritis, her bones would not
mend strongly enough for her to walk again. She spent her last 8 years
of life in a wheelchair in the same nursing wing of the same nursing
home in which my grandmother and uncle had died. She died there as well
on August 16, 2007.
After her death, what people said to me over and over, especially the
staff at the nursing home, was that she was the most positive, friendly,
kind hearted person they knew. They clearly all respected and admired
her. She was much loved.
I loved her, of course. I also resented her, mainly because all that
love given me included a lot of fear based controlling parental behavior
designed to keep me safe, always safe. It is called suffocating. I was
not free to move about and discover the world with she, and my
grandmother, creating a force field of “safety” around me. I finally
told her of my resentment, when she was in her early 80’s, we sat around
her kitchen table while I was visiting, and I laid it all out as gently
as I could and still be honest. She cried a lot. I felt guilty for
saying all I did. But, after the tears dried, we had a more grown up,
really more loving relationship. Ghosts were cut loose that day.
From that kitchen discussion on, we always acted our love out in
clearer, more affectionate ways. What a gift truth is, even, or maybe
especially, painful truth.
After that talk, I grew in my respect and more objective understanding
of who she truly was, what her strengths were and where they came from.
She was a deeply religious person. She was in relationship with a strong
and loving God through her Christian faith. Her values and actions,
particularly the love she gave to all, came from that source. She did
not believe that everyone should believe as she did. She always listened
patiently to my changing inner spiritual landscape. Always, it was her
faith that nurtured her, which filled her up and enabled her to nurture
us. I am grateful for that faith, for her trust in her loving God. Some
of that still nestles in my own heart.
In closing, I would like to pass on a bit of my mother’s wisdom to you.
This is a passage toward the end of her autobiography. Remember, this
personal history was addressed to my sister and I.
“If some of the things I have mentioned seem irrelevant to you, remember
that we are all linked to what has gone before. That is the obvious
lesson of history. I saw yesterday, and now I look toward tomorrow.
"I wish I had a magic phrase to leave with you, a nugget of wisdom that
would solve the mystery of life. I do have a longer view of life now,
which makes me see events in a different light, but it is hard to have
that until you have lived a long time. That is why it is of doubtful
value when older folk try to pass on to the young people who are still
in the stress and heat of daily struggle, the Keys to the Kingdom.
"One thing I do believe, and that is if you can give your children ROOTS
and WINGS in addition to much love, this may be the most you can do for
them. There just can’t be too much love shown. Be sure that all those
whom you love KNOW YOU LOVE THEM. TELL THEM. Then tell them again. Don’t
be afraid to touch, to hug, to let them feel your concern, your support.
Build them up, the world will do enough tearing down, enough hurting.
Your privilege is to give the healing and strength of love. If you make
others feel good about themselves, they will also feel good toward you.
It is a two way street. I only wish I had done more of this in my
earlier years. You still can. IT is the greatest of all gifts to each
other, to your children, and, in an ever widening circle, to your fellow
men and women. Do this, and you will never walk alone.”
Here on this Mother’s Day, 2008, as we sit here gathered together in
this spiritual community, I know that each of you has had your own
unique experience with your mothers. The one who bore you, who brought
you into the world. I would hope that all of you felt as nurtured and
loved by your mother as I felt by mine, but I know that is not
necessarily true. Some of you were raised by mothers too wounded by life
themselves to nurture you. It was not there to give. To you, especially,
on this day, may you find love from the other parent, or a relative, or
a close maternal friend. It is of great importance to feel loved today.
By someone.
I feel incredibly blessed by having the mother I had. She gave all she
knew how to give. I carry her inside me in so many ways. I embody her in
so many ways. I will always be grateful to Mary Margaret Sampson Bloom,
my ordinary, extraordinary mother.
Mother, I send you my deepest love and appreciation for who you were and
what you gave.
Your spirit will live in me forever.
Amen..
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