Last week, we celebrated my mother’s 89th birthday with flowers, chocolate, cake and grape juice. She accused me of making too much fuss about her birthday. But I had to. This was the first time in decades that I had the pleasure of celebrating my mother’s birthday with her. She now lives with Mary and me.
My mother living with us is an exciting adventure of discoveries. Over the years, I saw her as this extremely upstanding woman who could do no wrong, whose sole mission in life was sharing “the message” and raising up churches. She was so much of a saint in my eyes that there were certain subjects that I wouldn’t think of discussing with her.
Sitting at the kitchen table recently, I said to my mother, “Mom, do you remember that time when I was about four and you and dad left me alone one afternoon and didn’t return home until night? Where did you go?” The candidness of my mother’s reply took me by surprise: “We went to a dance.” Although I was a bit disappointed in hearing that my parents left me alone to enjoy themselves at a dance, I was excited to learn that my mother was “human” after all. I was even more taken aback when she revealed that she ran away from home at age eleven due to a problem that had arisen between her and the teacher at the church school she attended, for which her mother had planned to discipline her severely.
This was the first time I knew that there had been a school at Cornwall Barracks Church, which I attended as a child. And visualizing my mother as a child running twelve miles from our village, Ginger House, on a roughly paved road barefooted, to Port Antonio was a bit emotional for me. All these stories are forging a closer bond between my mother and me and are helping me to understand her and myself more clearly.
Telling stories about yourself, your childhood, your failures, your successes, your good times and your bad times to your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews is an immeasurably important way of helping them understand who you are, who they are, what is important in life and what is not. The biggest treat I can give my grandchildren is telling them about life in Ginger House. Often, one will say to me, “Granddad, tell us about Ginger House.” The others then chime in, “Yes, Granddad, tell us about Ginger House.” None of my grandchildren has been to Ginger House, but in asking for stories about Ginger House, they are essentially saying, “Granddad, we want to know who you really are. We want to know if you were like us as a child.”
My interactions with my mother and grandchildren have given me a greater understanding of and appreciation for Deuteronomy 11:19 & 21: “You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them…”
What a wonderful opportunity we have during the current lockdown to forge stronger ties with our children and grandchildren through storytelling! And what an amazing opportunity to heighten their appreciation of our values and our faith by recounting to them how God has led us in the past!