Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

Laura Lynn Brown

The Lens of Transforming Love {My Faith Heroine Series}

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I can’t think of a better way to finish out the My Faith Heroine series than with Laura Lynn Brown. She is one of the finest writers I know, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. When you talk with Laura — either online or in person, it makes no matter — you know that she is entirely tuned into you, 100 percent. She listens, really listens – such an incredibly rare and precious gift — and then, when she does speak, it’s with wisdom, grace and gentleness. Please welcome Laura to the blog, and before you dash off to do whatever calls you today, please stop by her brand new website, Makes You Mom, for a bouquet of mom-related stories, gift ideas and reading suggestions. The gorgeous flower photos alone are worth the visit!

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Post by Laura Lynn Brown

If I could talk to Mom about this, the first thing she would do would be to assert, quietly but firmly, that she’s not a heroine.

(Actually, the first thing she’d do is listen to me carefully, and wait patiently until I got to a good stopping place. Then she’d stop and think before she spoke. And if she could look over my shoulder now, she might compliment my changing “protest” to “assert,” then wonder aloud whether there might be an even more precise verb.)

And I’d explain — both of us knowing it’s a lame  excuse — that, well, that’s the series. The assignment. “My faith heroine.”

Then she’d nod, affirming that it was, in the end, my decision. And she’d say, with that powder-dry wit that even her intimates could mistake as seriousness, that if she had to be one, she might just as well be a hero.

Laura and Mom

Mom died nearly 26 years ago, nearly half my life ago. There’s a danger of mythologizing the long gone; I think this is especially true for anyone who lost a parent too young. What I know of her is partly memory, partly what I’ve learned over the years, from my brother, our father, her best friend, and other people back home who still, when I see them, give me the gift of anecdotes I hadn’t heard before.

Some memories have been replayed many times, the images like a split screen — on one side, how it felt and seemed at the time; on the other, the more complex understanding and reframing (and, sometimes, greater unknowableness) that come with the perspectives of middle age.

I never heard Mom pray. But I know she did. She wasn’t one to announce she was praying for someone. She just did it, quietly, and I imagine fervently. Sometimes she let me know, usually gently, when she thought I was making poor choices. But she didn’t visibly fret or let her mother-worry herd me like a border collie. I believe she trusted in God’s patience, in the work of the Holy Spirit, in the loving pursuit of the hound of heaven.

I seldom saw her reading her Bible. But I know that she did. It’s worn, with a cracked and taped spine, and notes throughout in her small, neat script.

The summer I was 11, she sent me to church camp. The family hadn’t been to church in a few years — she’d had two small children, Dad worked on Sundays, we just had the one car and she didn’t drive.  So I went off for a week to the woods of western Pennsylvania, a shy kid, and had a great time, and made friends I wrote to throughout the year. I kept going back and was eventually baptized there. Then we returned to church.

I never, ever, doubted her love. My brother and I were secure in the knowledge that not only did she love us, she liked us.

When relatives were in need — the elderly, mentally challenged cousin who could no longer live in her farmhouse; the single niece with a new baby who needed a place to live for a while — she took care of them. She found the cousin assisted living a quarter mile from our house, and took in the niece.

When she was angry, she guarded her tongue.

To the friends who called her, and the people who worked with her and became her friends, she gave good counsel.

She saw the humor in things, and made people laugh. She was skilled at the loving tease, and knew when to stop.

I could go on. I could paint, in detail, some of the memories  and stories coming to mind. But what they all add up to, and boil down to, is this: She had a deep, quiet, faithful relationship with the Lord. And because of that, as much as anyone I have ever known, she saw people through that lens of transforming love.

I am so very far from being the woman she was. I’m grateful for the ways, through memory and story (and through my brother, who bears her image in so many ways), she is still with me.

If I could talk to Mom about this, I’d thank her for her quiet example. She’d accept my thanks and then probably reflect back something good she saw in me. We’d hug. And I’d tell her I love her and I like her.

LauraLynnBrownLaura Lynn Brown’s essay “Fifty Things About My Mother” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2014. She is the author of Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories, and the keeper of a new multi-author website, makesyoumom.com.

This post is part of the My Faith Heroine Series in conjunction with the release of 50 Women Every Christian Should Know: Learning from Heroines of the Faith. Click here to read other posts in the #MyFaithHeroine series. 

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Everything That Makes Her Mom

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My friend Laura Lynn Brown has written the sweetest, most thoughtful book called Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories. A mix of personal vignettes, inspirational quotes and memory prompts, the book would make a lovely, personal gift for your mother (Mother’s Day is May 11!). Today, I’m using prompts from the chapter entitled “Mom in the Home” to write my own reflection of my mother, Maureen.

 

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The scent wafted out the open windows as I walked up the driveway. Even before I flung open the aluminum storm door, I knew what I’d see on the kitchen counter: a plate piled high with hermits — moist, spicy, raisiny, still warm from the oven.

Every couple of days a different scent greeted me on the driveway: oatmeal raisin cookies with a touch of cinnamon and clove. Crumbly coffee cake with the melt-in-your-mouth topping, spices cutting a dark rivulet through the center of each slice. Betty Crocker brownies, edges crunchy, middle gooey. Some afternoons I opened the fridge to glimpse chocolate pudding spooned smooth into four dainty glass cups, all in a neat row and covered in Saran Wrap, beads of moisture clinging like rhinestones to the underside of the plastic. When the days turned cold and dark, she’d pull a pan of bubbling crisp from the oven, the apples cooked to tender perfection.

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Later, when I was in high school, my mom rose at 5:30 a.m. on the mornings of my track or cross country meets to whip up a batch of Bisquick pancakes, “for energy” she always said. I’d wake to the sound of the metal griddle snapping shut and stumble into the bright kitchen to find a stack of floury pancakes sitting on my plate, the bottom one spongy with maple syrup.

My mom doesn’t bake much anymore, but she still demonstrates her love not so much in words or physical expression, but tangibly, in deed.

Now when she visits me in Nebraska, she irons all my cotton blouses, pleated skirts and linen pants, wanting me to enjoy the feeling of wearing fresh, crisp clothes. She Windexes the French doors, knowing the fingerprints and nose prints drive me crazy. She organizes my Tupperware drawer and polishes the silver tea set I inherited from Nana, revealing a reflective sheen beneath the tarnished gold-green. She dusts the tops of the ceiling blades and high above the kitchen cabinets, the dirty spots no one notices but me.

“There she is,” Laura Brown writes in Everything That Makes You Mom, “in the kitchen, cooking a birthday dinner, making gravy with glee, upholding holiday rituals, fighting grime. And there she is on the porch, and in the yard, doing whatever she did to make a house a home that we loved to live in and would want to return to, so naturally that we probably didn’t notice.”

It’s true, I didn’t notice everything my mom did for me back then – the hermits, the coffee cake, the cookies, the pancakes at 5:45 a.m. I took it for granted. I assumed that Norman Rockwell picture of nurturing and contentment was the way it was and the way it should be, for me, for everyone. But I remember now. And Mom, I just want to say: I am grateful.

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What’s your favorite memory of your mom in the home? 

As Mother’s Day approaches a few of us in the blogosphere have gathered to help spread the word about Laura’s beautiful book, Everything That Makes You Mom. If you’re on Facebook and/or Twitter and you’d like to help with a social media blitz, hop over here and sign up for the Thunderclap – it’s a super easy way to let lots of people know about this perfect-for-Mother’s Day gift book. Thank you!

 

Once More, With Feeling {I am a Spiritual Misfit Series}

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I met Laura Brown two years ago at a writers’ retreat deep in a Texas canyon, where the river runs jade and the hummingbirds gather like bees on the blossoms. I was immediately awed by her quiet presence. You can tell, within moments of meeting Laura, that she’s smart, really smart, and a deep, contemplative thinker. I was a little intimidated. When I found out she’d taken workshops with Lauren Winner, my writer idol, I was just about done in. I love Laura. I’m still a tweeny bit intimidated by her intelligence, but I know her now – I know her generous, kind heart; her gift of nurturing a friendship; her brilliant writing. Speaking of which, did you know Laura has written a book? It’s called Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories and it would make THE perfect Mother’s Day gift, which hint-hint, is less than one month away. Without further ad0, here’s Laura Brown, writing about finding a place in church…

 

One Sunday after I had moved to Pittsburgh for graduate school, I visited a new church. Early in the service, the preacher asked us to turn to the person beside us and, with as much feeling in our hearts as we could muster, declare to the person, really most sincerely, “I love you.”

I hate stuff like that. I think the worship leader lingo for it is manufactured enthusiasm. But I turned to the woman on my left, uncomfortably trying to do as I’d been asked. She turned her head slightly toward me, made a glance of eye contact, and muttered in a monotone, her lips moving barely more than a ventriloquist’s: “Iloveyou.”

The woman on my left was my mother.

Mom disliked that stuff, too. I followed her lead, sneering “Iloveyoutoo” back, and we both sat there with Mona Lisa smiles, trying not to crack up.

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I ended up not sticking with that church in my years in grad school. I spent a little time there, in the tribe of my youth, and also at a tiny Episcopal church, and with the Quakers, and with the Unitarians (where I always feel like I’ve had culture but I seldom feel like I’ve been to church), and a few mornings with the Catholics. But on most Sunday mornings I went to the church of coffee and The New York Times.

Mom died during my restless years in graduate school. I wish I could call her now and ask her about the ways she might have felt alien. I remember people used to look at her funny because she wrote in her Bible. If my home were burning and I could save two things, one in each hand, I would save my cat and her Bible.

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Misfit. This feels like an assigned topic from high school, a word that lies on my shoulders like an ill-fitting jacket, a word I squirm within. But of course I wear it, as most people do if we spend long enough among a body of believers. I eventually migrated back into worship on Sunday mornings, and spent many years in congregations that became home, and now — except for the few mornings a year when I sneak off for a maintenance dose of liturgy — I’ve come full circle, to the tribe of my parents. I’ve come for various reasons, but if you pressed me for one, I’d confess: I missed the a cappella singing.

I’m a misfit here, too. I still chafe at the manufactured enthusiasm of the song service. The preacher sometimes makes jokes he shouldn’t, and I tell him so privately, and then he pushes another of my buttons, in that teasing way of fatherly men that means they’re showing affection. My biggest lament is the invisibility of us single people in the church. And I could use every bit of space Michelle has afforded me here to talk about that. (We follow a man who was homeless and single, people. Don’t get me started …)

My sense of “Where do I fit?” has never been about estrangement from God or Jesus. It has usually been about finding a place in the church. And I think God wisely places us in families, and in the body called the church, precisely so we can bump against each other and learn to love people we don’t always like, and allow them to sand off our rough edges with their imperfect love.

Whatever our theological disagreements, whatever our resistance to the gimmick of the morning or trend of the season, whatever our unmet needs, there are these moments each week when all of us gathered unite our voices, speaking the same words, blending in harmony, and when my restless soul rests.

And (friend, do you mind if I tell this story?) sometimes, on Sundays away from home, a handful of us gather, various tribes and traditions in one room, ending a weekend retreat with a service designed to have something recognizable and comfortable for each one there (which means probably something in it will also be itchy for  each one there). I met Michelle on such a weekend. She happened to sit beside me that Sunday morning. There was a moment when one of us was overcome with emotion, and one of us wasn’t feeling it at all, and one reached out to hold the other’s hand. A heartbeat pulsed in our palms, and after a few seconds I couldn’t tell whose it was.

LauraBrownBy day, Laura Lynn Brown vanquishes dangling modifiers and makes the rough places smooth as a copy editor for a daily newspaper. When not working or writing, she enjoys playing Irish traditional music, baking bread, paddling her kayak in calm waters, and committing random acts of singing. She is the author of Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories and blogs at Lauralynnbrown.com.