If more people had known my mom, I’d like to think, we’d be in less of a mess today in so many ways that count. My mother was extraordinary to me and to those who knew her, if ordinary by many measures.
She liked to recount that when she was hospitalized with polio in the fifties, she listened to the medical staff describe her as “a white suburban housewife” on their morning rounds. That was so far from how I knew her that I could hardly wrap my head around it.
But the things my suburban housewife mother taught me were valuable lessons for a lifetime. First and foremost, I learned that life is not “all about me.” It wasn’t all about me, or her, or my dad, or any of my seven siblings. It was about us. Now, isn’t that a novel idea in our “me first” culture?
Sometimes we have to do things, or refrain from doing them, even if we don’t feel like it, or believe somehow it impinges on our individual rights. It works in a family, and it works in society.
Perhaps my mother’s experience with polio was formative. She and my dad faced the terrifying prospects of death or disability due to a disease beyond their control. I think my mom was as worried about leaving my father with the sole responsibility of raising a family as she was about anything else. I think she was forever grateful that she fully recovered. She made sure we all got every vaccination we were due for, and I remember in particular how thrilled she was to take us all for our polio vaccine when it was developed.
The debate over mask-wearing during the pandemic has become one of those frictional issues that my mother wouldn’t have tolerated. She would have quietly reminded us (once) that everyone deserves to stay well, end of discussion.
The devastating effects of the pandemic would have been mitigated by her lessons of self-sacrifice and self-discipline. There would have been no question that we would have self-quarantined and drastically scaled back activities from the get-go, flattening the curve early on, and remaining careful from then on, even if we longed to get back to normal.
My mom would have also understood the importance of listening to trusted sources of information, and the dangers of creating a fantasy world. And there would be no debate about getting in line for a vaccine at the earliest opportunity. The chance to trade a tiny risk of complications from a vaccine for the enormous risk of disease would absolutely be a no-brainer.
There are so many other lessons from my mother others would benefit from. Hate speech would never have happened, within our household or in the wider world, because she taught us to see and honor the innate goodness of each other and everyone around us. If you can love those you are jostling with every day at home, you can honor and respect all of God’s people. Her message was so strong and clear on this that it never occurred to me to think differently, much less to direct hateful or demeaning words at others.
In my mother’s frame of reference, individual rights would never hold sway over the greater good. She would understand what research has borne out, that the more available guns are, the greater the potential for harm. Just as she would keep dangerous items completely out of the reach of her children, she would advocate for tight restrictions on weapons whose main purpose is to maim or kill, regardless of individual rights or an 18th-century amendment to our constitution.
My mother did not tolerate lies. She had an uncanny ability to see right through the tangled web her children sometimes tried to weave while skirting the truth. Similarly, she would call out advertisers and politicians if they distorted the truth, and she taught us how to analyze what we read or heard and measure it against what we knew to be true.
And, were she here today, she would absolutely encourage open and clear-eyed discussion of divisive issues, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel, knowing that we can’t solve intractable issues when we’ve brushed them under the rug.
My mother embraced life. I realize with a start that today I am nearly a decade older now than she was when she died. On Mother’s Day, I am especially aware that life is short. I have learned from her that life is precious and meant to be embraced.
(Millie LaFontaine lives in Concord.)