LETTERS FROM HOME: MOTHERS' MESSAGES TO CHILDREN ABOUT THE WORLD

May 9, 1996

Dear Mom,

I guess it's odd to write you a letter when I could just drive a mile or so to see you. But you know I don't always find the time to do that as often as I should. Seems there's always something else to do, someone else to see. So I do it and see them and before you know it the time is gone. And I know that's not right.

DC and I have lived far from our parents for so long that being in the same town again seems odd sometimes.

A lot of children have to leave their parents, you know, get some distance so they can grow up. That occurred naturally for you with your peripatetic parents, and dad had to learn to be a man quickly when his father died so young. All that growing up has taken me quite some time longer.

"There's no such thing as an old soul," someone said. "Just slow learners."

So here I am, married and making a life back in my hometown. It was necessary to leave in order to be here now.

I think of the ways you and dad helped me. Giving me the money to take my first trip to California. And not making it hard when the time came a few years later to move there.

Last weekend at the Beale Street Music Festival we heard a woman named Reba Russell singing in one of the tents. Her voice resides in the golden room somewhere between Bonnie Raitt's and Janis Joplin's. She cried and cooed and prowled the stage like someone who hadn't had all the wildness civilized out of her. A one-legged man in a wheelchair intently watched her dance. Another guy sipped beer and ogled a pretty blond girl with a ring in her navel. All was right with the world.

That's one of the treasures you've given me, a feeling of rightness and well-being. Comes from being loved, sure, but also from experiences associated with those feelings.

Like eating your mustard-yellow potato salad.

I think of Granny, whose chicken and dumplings -- just the smell of them -- were a signal to me of goodness in the world. Grandma's coffee is the same.

These are messages from mothers to children that the world is meant for you and you for it.

Your presence and constancy are gifts we children, being children, sometimes take for granted. But we know, saint and murderer alike, that our parents' love is not shaped by our accomplishments or misdeeds. You are the closest manifestation to God we know.

And so families across the country will gather around their mothers Sunday, will feed them well and lavish them with flowers. Not because we're supposed to but because you are essential to us.

Mother is the ground we sprang from, our connection with the mystery of creation. You gave us life. What could ever compare?

I pray for those who are estranged from their mothers or whose mothers are gone.

Everyone has to leave home, but sooner or later in one way or another everyone will find their way home again.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.