Homecoming|Fuzz
(For Penn State. It was homecoming. But homecoming has a deeper meaning to me this weekend. In November, of last year, my mother went into the hospital. She hasn’t been released since. Today, almost one year later, she comes home.
This essay, has been on my heart for days, weeks, and months — perhaps, even, my whole life.
To you who read this, I say: enjoy, wrestle, challenge, and see if some good might come out of this.
To my mother, mamami, my queen, Ayaba, I say, Welcome Home. We’ve been waiting.)
Homecoming|Fuzz from DavidAdewumi on Vimeo.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The knocks had a steady rhythm and cadence, as their intensity and volume crescendoed.
Clearly, someone wanted in my room with an ever-increasing fervor.
An intruder.
An assailant.
A person who might cause me pain.
…
My Mother.
I remember an odd sense of removal. I had this thought, and then a thought about the thought :’For once in my life, I am deeply, deeply afraid of my mother.’
This is something, I never, ever had experienced before when I thought of my mother, the woman who had brought me into this world.
Fear.
There’s this ancient Hebrew word, often used in this Deity-inspired text we’ve come to know as the Bible.
El Shaddai.
Now if we were willing to ask questions, and understand that this deity, this being who inspired this ancient text, had out of His own image, made both man and woman.
Come again?
There’s a part of God that’s feminine?
Some translate the word ‘Shaddai’ to mean almighty and powerful. But some might translate ‘Shaddai’ connected to the ancient word “shadayim’ which means “breasts.” Thus, it is thought to be connected to fertility and fruitfulness that God has commanded in the world.
Every time I had thought of God — I had thought of Him as a Father.
A commander. A general. A task master. A warrior.
But God as…
a protector,
a provider,
a compassionate being,
a mother?
Where we last left off in the story of my mother, I was in the room of her deathbed, my eyes red, the man called a ‘machine’ by his friends, with tears streaming down his face, trying to come to terms with a mother whose very life had lost all hope.
And so, last year, I wrote ‘The Art of Giving Up’ and shared a story of a mother who was almost taken from our family here, by kidney failure and heart failure and diabetes gone wild. In her eyes, she had died yet also had been safely returned to us.
But I wrote that there was something deeper. That there was more to the story than the physical illness — things seen, whilst the battle raged endlessly against what is and was unseen.
“Yet even as I write this, the dragon has reared his ugly head…and again my mother has returned to the hospital, afflicted by illnesses the type both seen and unseen.”
How much of our pain, how much of our isolation, how much of our solitude comes because we simply are not able to share the pains and wounds in our life?
How much of our pain comes because our dragon is hidden in our closet, under our beds, in our basements — that even if they were laying out, certainly, we’d hide them before anyone, any guest, any other person could see them.
Would I be so bold, then, to open the cellar door, bust open the closet, lift up the bed to release the ‘dragon’ of not one man, but of a family, of a generation — a world apart?
I was born in 1987.
In 1988, my mother had her first outbreak of what was later diagnosed as manic depression/bi-polar disorder.
Mamami, as I so affectionately called her, was one of the happiest and truly joyful people I knew. Even now, for all the things I might have done or accomplished, in my small tiny village, in our tiny corner of the world — Lemont — I am simply known as “Grace’s son.”
The postal workers at the post office love her, neighbors I’ve never seen nor recognize come by our house to see how she’s doing, people stop me on the street to tell me how much a blessing my mom has been on their lives.
But that fateful day in that fateful year, a family witnessed a burst of … lunacy that it had never seen before and had never known.
One author, writes how all of us have insulators that put any noun — any place, person, or thing — into a certain frame of reference. So if you went to a concert hall, and the usher handed you a squirrel — you might say to yourself, ‘Where am I’?, ‘What is this place?’, ‘What am I doing here?’
The box, your insulators, would be removed.
So when my mother was walking down the street wailing at the top of her lungs, belligerent, and delusional, and crazy — there I said it — the insulators in my family collapsed.
Our shalom, our sense of a wholeness, and completeness in our home, had been violated.
It had been shattered to pieces.
Can you imagine, looking into your mother’s eyes, and thinking to yourself, literally:
‘My mother has lost her mind. She’s actually crazy, in every sense of the word.’
‘David, you’re going to have to stay with your uncle and aunt, your dad is going away on a business trip, and so is your mom.’
I was 4-years-old.
Yet even to my young mind, I remember wondering — ‘but how could mommy be going on a business trip, her job doesn’t require her to travel’?
Later.
My mother, who for so many years had taken her medicine, had come to the conclusion, as so many of those who struggle with clinical depression do, that she was fine, healed, and no longer needed medicine.
I was 15-years-old.
11 years later, I had finally learned the truth. And I understood, then, that my childhood, that my mother, for almost my whole life had been taken from me.
Perhaps now I understand why…
I couldn’t hardly ever sleep over at my best friend’s house…
I couldn’t go fishing with a friend and his family from school…
I wasn’t ever allowed to pursue anything too risky
If you were a man, a husband, with a wife, and five children, and a marriage that by all accounts if it was like four out of every five in the country where one spouse suffers from depression would be in divorce — and if you had to manage all this while working a full-time job which required you to travel out of the country several times a year, might you not want your children to do less — and to stay right at home where you know they’ll be safe?
What if the mother, for her illness, might not always trusted to obey her motherly instincts and protect, and advocate, and defend?
In one of the Gospels, written by the one whom Jesus loved, five separate times he writes of the Spirit of a God – the Holy Spirit — and the son of a God — Jesus– who said that it was better that he leave. That when he left he would send the Comforter, the Spirit.
He tells his disciples that it if he does not go away, the Helper, should not come to them, but if he goes, he will send him to them.
In Greek, this word for ‘comforter’ is Parakletos.
This word ‘parakletos’ referred to a legal advisor, an advocate, a defender, a representative who would come forward on behalf of another.
In the widest sense of the word, it means a ‘helper’ one who aids another, or who literally runs beside us.
This man, this son of God, then, would leave, to send a helper who would run beside us and be our advocate before God himself.
Often times, we’ve heard the story of a mother who would go to great acts to defend her children — adrenaline pumping even gain super-human strength and lift a car to free their child.
Could, then, our mothers be our advocates, our defenders, our person to run beside us and encourage us?
It was 7th grade.
I came home one day from track practice and my mother calls me into her room.
She sits me down and says ‘David, I want you to quit track.’
Confused, I ask ‘but, why?’
Finally, days later she tells me.
A former teacher of mine had seen me run a few races for the junior high track team and had concluded, to my mother’s face, that if she had a dollar for every time I finished in last place, she would be rich.
A teacher said this, to my mother.
My mother later explained to me, ‘I don’t want anybody saying that about any of my children. I’d rather have you quit track so they didn’t say that.’
Mamami was acting as my defender, as my advocate, as my legal advisor who stood between me and an accuser and said ‘this shall not be.”
As my parakletos.
The Bible has a great deal to say about widows and orphans — for see in the ancient near east a widow might be a mother without a husband taking care of her boys, and orphans might also be translated as fatherless.
In fact in the last year, I’ve had a great deal of interaction with young men and women who for some tragic reason or another, don’t have the presence of father in their life.
You know the drill.
The girls are more prone to seek a guy’s approval, after never having experienced the love and care of her dad; a fatherless son might be angry, or deal with a dozen other things people with way more wisdom and knowledge than I have figured he might struggle with.
They hurt. They ache. They suffer.
The father has left a void in the home, in the life, and in the heart of the children he has left behind.
But what about the motherless?
What about those whose mothers were taken — by an illness, by a job, by a lifestyle, by a a tragedy…?
A mother is home.
A mother is comfort.
A mother is sanctuary.
When the home and sanctuary is violated, there is unrest in the heart.
While visiting my mother at the State Psychiatric Hospital in Danville, PA, one of my best friends says ‘your mom is not all there. That’s not the Grace I knew.’
Is there something deeper going on here?
Have I known — some part of my inner self — that things were not the way they should be? Some part of my inner self, taking a look at my beautiful, joyful mother, the matriarch and prayer warrior, the faithful one — stubborn and loving as always — is there some part of me that for my whole life, knew, that my mother was ‘not all there’?
In Proverbs, the writer pontificates: A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, But when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken.
Have I, with a sad heart and a mother absent in psyche, in spirit at times, left my spirit broken and in search of a home, of a sanctuary, of a comfort to fill that place?
I remember in my first semester at Penn State, the spring of 2006, I was with a friend at his house. I received a call from my dad urging me to come home quickly.
My mom had not been taking her medicine for several weeks, and the dragon, as it always does when not subdued, reared its ugly head. I rushed home immediately.
I rushed ‘home’ immediately.
Or maybe when in high school one of my best friends offered me to stay in his house so I didn’t have to return to my sanctuary that had long since been destroyed.
My mother, her soul, her psyche, was in the fight of her life.
Or maybe it was the scene a couple years later. The police and ambulance gathered around my house, stirring up the quiet residents of Lemont in a small scene that had become all too familiar.
My mom juked to her left, juked to her right, and tried to spin out of the grasp out of one police officer, as the other officer pulled a ‘Terry-Tate’ and took her down to the ground.
The police were there to take away my mother. Perhaps there was a numbness at this point that almost made me laugh at the sight of a 50-year-old woman attempting to outmaneuver cops in a living-room sized space to escape to freedom.
Escape.
A danger to herself, a danger to her family, a danger to our sanctuary.
One outsider, who traveled to Rwanda to document the atrocities that happened there in 1994 wrote:
You can watch “Sometimes in April” or “Hotel Rwanda,” or read one of the many genocide books, but it’s hard to imagine this event fully without seeing one of the rural churches where sanctuaries turned into mass graves
“People thought they would be safe here,” driver Jamada said. “In our culture, our belief is that no one can do something wrong in a church.”"
The church, it so happened, was not a sanctuary from the perpetrators who saw it fit to thoroughly desecrate both the building and the entity, and leave in its stead a vestige of ruins, as all hiding were all killed.
In my young mind, in my own persons culture, I had a belief, that no one and nothing could do wrong in my church, in my sanctuary, in my home. When some would ask how I could go on endlessly, and when they whispered things like ‘Superman’ and ‘Dave, you’re a machine,’ I’d tell them my home was my sanctuary, my comfort, my solace — the place where I could return to and rest if all was wrong with the world.
I, like the Rwandans before me, did not believe this was an entity that could be violated.
I was wrong.
And I believe the threat to this comfort, to this home, to this sanctuary might be one of the greatest tacit threats to plague the nation — the loss of motherhood.
When I think of my mom, I think fondly of those nights as a young boy where I would have nightmares and would run to my parents room, all of a whole 6 feet away, and snuggle in between my parents, and my mother would wrap her arms around me, and I’d get that feeling inside of me that everything would be all right.
You know.
That warm
fuzzy
feeling
She would be that voice beside me, my parakletos, my advocate, my defender — to run beside me, whisper in my ear, and let me know that I was going to make it.
‘I know how you feel.’
A comforter.
And run and hide and try as I might in the absence of my mother, my true mother, the one who would smile and shout and sing and dance and pray for days, had I since sought out that comfort and home and sanctuary in other avenues and other persons and other places?
There’s this saying, ‘wherever you go, there you are.’ That what plagues and torments you here, will torment you there as well.
And as I’ve struggled with this very real idea of living without a mother, I’ve also learned and witnessed and been taken in by a handful of women whom I fondly call ‘mother’, and who lovingly call me ’son.’
Women in Pennsylvania, women in Maryland, who take me into their homes, feed me, cloth me, give me places to sleep. Who care for me, who love on me, who even do my laundry.
Who make me go to the doctor when I’m a stubborn grown man who refuses to admit that ’something might be wrong.’
Who defend me, who are my advocates, who are my defenders, who run beside me and whisper in my ear ‘David, you’re going to be OK, you’re going to make it, it’s going to be all right. I love you.”
The African proverb says ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’
I now believe that it takes a mother to raise a village.
I am in awe of mothers. I have seen single mothers, divorced mothers, married mothers — and in all I see a constant, unfailing, undying, faithful, exuberant, and proud love of their children.
These women would go through hell and back – and back again — to ensure that their children are safe and taken care of and protected.
To ensure that everything would be all right.
They have taken me in, under their wing. Nurtured me. Cared for me. Treated me as one of their own. Celebrated birthdays and holidays and opened their homes to me.
However, there is a deeper sense, that there is a God that would give a double portion. A God who would be a father to the fatherless and might also be a mother to the motherless. That some or all of the things that an earthly parent or parents could not provide — that God could and would and will satisfy.
That God, the divine, the Spirit, would be my parakletos.
That God would be enough.
In the third gospel this son of God, this rabbi, this messiah — Jesus — says that he would gather his children around him as a [mother] hen gathers her young under her wing.
Jesus as Mama Goose?
Advocating.
Defending.
Compassionate.
Empathetic.
Loving.
Running alongside of us, encouraging us, whispering ‘I love you.’
‘You can do it.’
‘You’re going to make it.’
‘It’s going to be all right.’
May you rest in the arms of the almighty, under the shadow of the wings of the mother hen.
May you find peace in a Comforter who knows how you feel.
May you find your sanctuary, your home, your shalom, your peace — for your weary and broken and bruised inner spirit.
May you see, that indeed, he is all you ever need.
He is all you ever need.
He is all you ever need.
He is all you ever need.
).
Recent Comments