Recently, I’ve come across several magazine articles where the interviewer asks the subject: “What is the best advice your mom ever gave you?”
Each time, my mind races. The question resonates. My mother, heaven forbid I call her Mom, gave me lots of advice. But the best? It’s taken me awhile to narrow her wisdom to one piece of advice, but I have to say it is “connect the dots.”
As a child, I loved my connect-the dots puzzle books almost as much as my reading books, coloring books and paper dolls. I can still hear her say, “Connect the dots in order. You won’t see the whole picture without following the numbers in order. You’ll miss the details.” Ever the obedient child, I started at one, drew a line to two and so forth. Once the image was complete, I could color it however I chose. No rules for coloring, not even ‘stay within the lines.’
But it wasn’t only with puzzles that Mother encouraged me to connect the dots. As far back as I can remember, she was prompting me to make connections between stories we read. How were these two alike? How were they different? These two questions remained a part of our discussions about books until her death. When I was a student, she frequently, asked me to explain connections between what I was reading this year in English as compared to what I might have read the previous year. So its no surprise that comparative lit turned out to be one of my favorite college classes.
Mother and Daddy were sponsors of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at our church long before I was a teen participant and they continued in this role even after I graduated high school. One of Mother’s main projects was to encourage each teen to be in charge of an evening’s program. She worked with us, pushing us to take the prepared lesson, locate the appropriate scripture prompting the lesson, study it, and make the connection. Why does this Biblical verse support or prompt this message? After we understood this link, she then showed us how to chose hymns and other supporting material appropriate to the lesson. In learning to create the evening’s program, we learned the lesson of the program itself.
My college professors my senior year assigned six research papers for the semester. I knew I could write the papers, but could I accomplish that much research in such a short period of time. I could hear Mother’s words. Connect the dots. What one element connected all of my classes? This time, it was Greek and Roman mythology. I could conduct an extensive study in this field and write papers for the English department’s Folklore, Shakespeare and History of the English Language classes; for Religion’s Religions of the World, and for Education, a yearlong course guide, with emphasis in one particular area, for a high school English class, and a six-week lesson plan covering an extensive study.
However, connections for my mother were not limited to books, programs, everyday routines. She truly saw the connections between people of all ages, beliefs, cultures. She felt she could learn something new from each person she encountered.
Early each spring, my mother hired a yard man to get her garden beds ready for planting. She worked along side him, not to supervise, but to learn his techniques and listen to his advice.
My mother, who grew up during the Depression, had long wanted to be an English teacher. In fact, she finally attended college between the time my dad died and she married my stepfather. But she had not waited until middle age to begin her studies. She had been studying her entire life. She was the one who introduced me to John Donne’s “No Man Is an Island.”
This seventeenth century poem begins: “No man is an island,/Entire of itself,/Every man is a piece of the continent,/A part of the main./If a clod be washed away by the sea,/Europe is the less…”
See the connection? Oh! I do, as surely as if I draw a line from one to two to three.
Happy Mother’s Day. What is the best advice your mother ever gave you?
2018
Comments