I tend to lose track of the dates during these summer months. In the dentist’s office yesterday morning, I was filling out forms and hazarded a guess that it was sometime around August 9. I was slightly startled, therefore, when my computer calendar informed me later in the evening that it was in fact August twelfth, which means that 1) I had missed the feast day of my patroness, and 2) it was my mother’s birthday. So, although this is a bit belated, I wanted to pay a tribute to them both.

St. Clare is a somewhat retiring figure compared to her colorful male counterpart. She seems to make her reputation largely as St. Francis’ sidekick, famous mostly for her inclusion in the Assisi crowd but far behind Francis when it comes to colorful stories and amazing miracles. There is, of course, the famous monstrance story, but where Francis wandered around, preached to birds, stripped naked for beggars, tamed violent animals, traveled to the Middle East, etc etc, Clare seems mainly to have settled down in Assisi, gathered her Poor Ladies around her, and quietly assumed the mantle of responsibility. It was the custom of the Poor Ladies (they assumed the name “Poor Clares” only on her death) to keep silence most of the time, to hold their eyes downcast, and, of course, to live always in great poverty. And behind that mantle of silence and poverty, St. Clare largely vanishes. The impact of her firm and loving leadership can be seen in the order she established, which gathered scores of women in her lifetime (including her own mother and sister) and continued into the centuries afterwards. But in the drama of Assisi, she remains largely a background figure, always present but usually taken for granted.

My mother was regularly taken for granted, too, as good mothers usually are. Healthy, happy children typically do take their mothers for granted, particularly in their early years. In a way, this is what mothers are for – they are a warm and protective presence on whom the child comes instinctively to rely. Of course they also provide services of many kinds. They cook meals, wash clothes, run baths, set up doctor’s appointments, and a million other things. But these services could be provided by an institution, and sometimes are. Our mothers, however, instill a sense of trust and well-being that no institution could ever provide. In a way, it was by taking our mothers for granted that we came to have a deep, untroubled expectation that we would always be loved.

At younger ages it’s not really normal for children to think much the sacrifices their parents made for the sake of raising them. As they get older, though, it is good for them to develop more of an appreciation for this. In my mother’s case: she left college at nineteen to marry my father and follow him across the country for law school. (As she’s always told us, she thought even at the time that she was too young. But she had found the right man to marry, so what else could she do?) The next two decades were largely consumed by children (there are five of us) and moving regularly from one place to another while my father got his career off the ground. In the early years my mother had to contend with an unhappy husband that she rarely saw (he was working as a high-power lawyer, a job that he hated.) Then they made a switch (to academia), and she got her husband back, but at the cost of an enormous cut in income. They spent the next few years dealing with rental properties and coupon clipping and no real job security.

Perhaps I should note: I can appreciate now how the moving and the money and the career changes must have been somewhat difficult for my young mother. It all just washed over me at the time. Moving is actually fun when you’re a little kid; everybody who’s really important to you comes along anyway, and the novelty, first of piles of boxes and then of a new place, is mostly just exciting. Meanwhile, the income drop came too early for me to notice the lifestyle change much (I was three), and all through childhood I never worried much about money. But again, I think this is a tribute to my parents. Their worries were not inflicted on us. Even indirectly I don’t think we felt them much. (Often kids will absorb a general feeling of worry and gloom in the household, though they may not understand exactly what’s wrong. We certainly knew that the family’s funds were limited and that we should eat what my mother fixed and not beg for things in stores. But apart from that, I think we generally felt pretty confident that all was well and our parents would figure things out.)

Leaving college was a sad thing for my mother, because she loved it and had always meant to finish. Once my father entered academia, she started taking classes at the institutions where he was teaching, working her way slowly towards finishing a degree. I’m sure she felt some regret at missing out on the experience of four unbroken years of college life, and those youthful pleasures could not really be recalled. But in some ways, her educational plan worked out remarkably well, better even than if she had finished the degree before getting married. She ended up graduating when I was in high school, and then took a few piecemeal graduate courses over the next few years. But now that her kids were starting to leave the nest, she began thinking in bigger terms, and today we’re both in PhD programs, both working on research and dissertation writing. (She’s a year ahead of me, actually, but we’re close enough to the same stage that it makes for a lot of fun conversations.) It’s hard to think that this would ever have happened if her BA had been twenty years old (or more!) by the time she had the leisure to start considering such a step. I think it’s a great example of how the things you give up for love’s sake sometimes come back to you in surprising ways.

And, going back to the theme of “being taken for granted”, I think it was a very good thing, for our whole family, that we kids were never “her whole life.” Obviously we were a major part of it and I’ve already said that she made numerous sacrifices for our sake, but she never ceased to have interests of her own, and this was a gift to us as well. She has lots of talents, which certainly enriched our lives in many ways, but it was clear that these were not merely “sacrifices” for our sake because she herself enjoyed them. So, for example, she has a flair for decorating, and particularly for using color to bring life and interest to a room. She is a good seamstress, and her sewing projects included Halloween costumes and Sunday dresses for me and my sister. She is musical, and particularly enjoys singing. She has sung in numerous choirs throughout her adult life, and was always active about putting together smaller musical numbers for this or that event; once we got older, her kids were sometimes drafted to assist with these. She is also, I might add, a very good cook, and a creative cook, of the sort who is regularly finding new and interesting recipes to try. Now, as I say, all of these talents certainly brought much pleasure to the family, but even more so because we could see that they brought pleasure to her. She instilled in us an appreciation for many of life’s finer things, and some of these lessons affected me more deeply than I ever realized at the time. (As I discovered, for example, when I moved into a house for the first time and suddenly felt an urge to start painting.)

As kids, we always knew Mom was there for us, but she was not overbearing. She came to our school programs, made soup for us when we were sick, and was there when we got home from school. I remember forgetting my lunch several times in elementary school and thinking all morning, “I hope Mom notices before lunch and brings it by the school!” She usually did. Details like that mean a lot when you’re a kid. At the same time, she knew when to leave well enough alone. With our education, for example, she was always very conscientious about helping us with the critical stages, reading books with us daily when we were first learning to read, or quizzing us with flash cards when we got to the multiplication tables. We had lots of fun family activities (museums, hiking, trips to places of historical interest, etc.) But she didn’t obsess about our homework when we were in school; we were mostly expected to take care of that ourselves. It was good for instilling a measure of responsibility, I think. (The only possible downside was that we were all a little too smart. School at the lower grades was a little too easy, and it might have made us a bit lazy in some of our habits.) I see the effects of a different strategy in some of my students now, who come to my office asking how they can get an A, expecting somehow that a fail-proof plan should be worked out specially for them. But it was also consistent with how things worked in my family to trust each person to handle certain things for themselves. Mom would take care of us, but she wasn’t put on the planet solely for our sakes. Having seen a few people whose parents did seem to live mostly for them, I can appreciate now what a blessing this was for us. It’s awfully burdensome for a child, particularly as he gets older, to be his mother’s whole life.

Now that we’re all adults (well, almost all — my youngest brother is still in high school) I can see that my mother worries about her kids resenting her. Not that there’s any specific thing that I know to occasion such resentment, because she was a good and devoted mother and certainly none of us have turned into criminals or drug addicts. (My older brother got his Masters and worked for the World Bank before going back for a PhD in economics, my sister is finishing a stint in the Peace Corps, and the older of my younger brothers is just going into his junior year of college.) But I suppose people blame their parents for all kinds of things, and every time one of us remembers some minor injustice from our childhood (usually laughingly), she rolls her eyes, looks at my father, and says, “You see, dear? They all resent me.”

None of us resents her. But it is natural, once you reach adulthood, to begin reflecting on your own upbringing, considering which of your parents’ strategies you should imitate, and which you should change. In her case, I’d say there’s a lot more to imitate than to change — indeed, our regular readers, if they’ve read this post to the bottom, were probably nodding their heads at certain points as they suddenly figured out where I got a lot of my ideas about marriage and motherhood and womanhood more generally. But if she doesn’t get as much praise as she deserves, that’s partly her own fault. For one thing, it’s not in her personality to be very comfortable with too much overt praise (for example, she was never the sort of mom who enjoyed getting sweet, gushy cards for Mother’s Day.) More importantly, though, she really was taken for granted in a significant way, because she didn’t make herself per se the primary focus of our childhood. She was always there, always loving, always the one who signified where home was. She made home such a welcoming place, in fact, that we never worried that it wouldn’t still be there for us when we moved on into our own adult lives. She was completely taken for granted — and that’s not a bad thing at all.

Happy Birthday, Mom! Santa Ciara, ora pro nobis!