On my Mother

Template for the Intellectual Life

A picture I took of Mom a few years ago on our porch in Colorado Springs

For me, my mother Christine is the template for the intellectual life. Not for her regular studies, but for her solitary pursuit of what some are privileged to receive in a formal way: a liberal education. She scraped together bits of her own human formation—pieces of herself—during six different moves around the country (and one across the Atlantic to Ethiopia) while raising as many children.

Her formal schooling consisted of a bachelor of arts in education at Indiana University, class of 1992. After a few years teaching at an inner-city school in San Antonio, Christine met Charlie at a two-stepping club and they wed a short time later.

Newly married to my father and pregnant with my brother, her liberal education began. Lacking much catechesis, she joined an Opus Dei circle in Texas where the Cooperator intoduced her to ideas like “formation,” “apostolate,” and “spiritual reading.” Ideas shape life, and good ones can help make a life into the work of God.

My parents learned that being Catholic is, in fact, a work: God makes steep demands of those who say they want to follow him. For Mom and Dad, the original command to “be fruitful and multiply” was inspiring and, through the time that followed in which they bore six children, harrowing. In the early years, my parents taught natural family planning to other young couples looking to meet the demands of their faith. Following my father, Mom took the ideas she learned in her Opus Dei circles and fertility classes and shared them with others. She was a teacher.

Meanwhile, we were all very young and she catechized us. I remember being the only one in my third grade First Communion class who knew what a monstrance was. Recently, I texted her about this and she replied: “I had children knowing nothing, without a plan of sorts…just wanting to do right by you all. I wish I was more thoughtful and organized, I tried.”

Mom’s efforts—which will probably get her out of years in Purgatory—moved us each through ten years of piano lessons. We all spent countless hours banging through measures of Hanon and Schubert and Chopin and Joplin, wearily listening to the others practice, practice, practice, year after year. On and off, my mother took lessons herself, quietly picking out lines of Satie’s Gymnopédie Nos. 1, 2, and 3 after we were all in bed. She knew how to read music from her days as a flutist in high school. She even performed at a few of our recitals, but stopped after a while due to performance anxiety.

Mom has always been self-conscious about her schooling. She wishes she had known about the liberal arts growing up, that she had the chance for deep learning about history, philosophy, theology, and literature. So she made sure we read good things: Little House on the Prarie, Anne of Green Gables, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, The Lord of the Rings, A Taste of Blackberries, The Member of the Wedding, A Separate Peace, Death Be Not Proud, Jane Eyre. (I recall perusing my friends’ bookshelves filled with Magic Treehouse and Captain Underpants; “Those things are trash. You’re not reading them,” she would say.)

As we grew up and left for college, she had more time to pursue her own education. She started a four-year intensive Scripture study at the Denver Catholic Biblical School in 2020. A year and a half ago, she started a “Well Read Moms” book club with a group of empty- and almost-empty-nesters, women who have lived complicated yet faithful lives. They are not scandalized by the literature they read because it depicts the world they live in and into which they have sent their many children.

Several months ago, Mom published a piece entitled “The Second Act” in the book club newsletter on the pain and disillusionment of letting one’s children go after having spent everything on them. Below is an excerpt:

Of course, I want my children to grow up, mature, have their own lives. That was the point of being a mother, but I never really thought about what that would mean for me. The terrible separation that happens when a child grows up and leaves the safety of your little domestic church. My life had been wrapped up in my little existence, my little church. This life may have been minor and inconsequential by today’s standards, but it was never small. It was big with all the things that create a family history. We had been a unit, a team with me at the helm. Now the time has come for my people to be their own people, their own version of themselves, outside the nuclear family unit. This unique time for us is ending, but it is not over.

If I am honest, this has been time to reflect on who I am and who God is. I know God has a plan for me in this next stage of life; it is not a dead end; I have not been conned, although, it feels that way some days. It is the second act, a new role. I will always miss those sweet days of motherhood when I was sun and moon to my children, everyone looking to me for so many things. I am the sun and moon in God’s eyes...his precious daughter looking intently at her Father, waiting for the next act to begin.

I have left home, but I bring back the things I pick up from outside and show them to Mom. Since I started college, I have tried to share what I learn with her. We have small conversations over wine and dinner prep when I’m home. We cover Aristotle, Augustine, and Dostoevsky alongside updates about my siblings and happenings at our home parish. They go together, of course. Why else would anyone study any of these things except that they make daily life more beautiful by reminding us that it is already? These authors and friends teach us that the suffering, disappointment, heartbreak, and painful separation that accompanies growing older are actually the substance of our communion and so the source of joy, because Christ draws all things to himself and makes them new.

My mother’s gritty attempt at a liberal education made a family. And even though we are away from her, those very same efforts continue to bear fruit. My daily striving to read well and write well is her striving. My first act is her second act. I hope to follow well.