A Mother’s Love

When I was in sixth grade, I punched a boy in my class. Knocked him flat on his back in the middle of the hallway.

For the record, this boy deserved it. In the two months leading up to the incident, he had been assigned to the seat behind me in school. Every single day of those two months he would sharpen his pencil until the tip glittered dangerously, then spend the morning poking me in the back repeatedly. In the afternoons, he would amuse himself by snapping the newest addition to my undergarment wardrobe, my bra strap. Neither were these playful pokes and snaps. I would come home, often in tears, and my mom would turn me around and stifle a gasp when she saw the deep marks on my back, dark from pencil lead that stuck in the bottoms, and the red, welted line beneath my bra strap.

Time and time again my mother spoke to the teacher, a teacher who, for some unknown reason, harbored a deep resentment toward me. The teacher insisted I was lying, that she had watched us specifically during class and that he had done no such thing. She was rude to my mother and rude to me, and it was clear that my mother would not find an ally there.

My mother, God bless her, didn’t know where to turn. She didn’t have a way to protect me during school, so she did what any mother worth her salt would do. She said, “Calah, the next time he touches you, turn around and deck him.”

A mere two days later, I walked into school in a fit of nerves. I had just gotten my hair cut, and it was not a very flattering cut. To an awkward sixth-grader with burgeoning acne problems and thick glasses who was already being tormented in school, a bad haircut seemed disastrous. But I gathered my courage and walked into school with my head held high. I smiled at my friends, who politely pretended not to notice the inverted blond bowl on my head, and quietly began gathering my books from my locker. Suddenly, I felt a hand roughly grasp my bra strap and pull back with the enthusiasm of an archer. Thwack. The strap snapped back against my skin so hard that I lost my breath. “Hey, stupid, what happened to your head? It looks like a bomb exploded on it.”

I don’t actually remember doing it, but apparently I spun around with my arm already swinging and delivered a spectacular right hook. The boy went down, too stunned to cry out, his eye already beginning to show the tell-tale signs of blackening.

The kids around us were silent. Too silent for what they had just witnessed. My arm was still extended outward when I looked over my shoulder and saw the teacher that hated me standing there, frozen, her face contorted with anger.

She grabbed me roughly by the arm, so roughly that I had a bruise there for a week, and dragged me to an empty room directly across the hall from our classroom. She told me that she was going to make sure that I was expelled if it was the last thing she did, that this was just the kind of thing she had expected from me, and made me sit there, facing my class, while she coddled the boy with the black eye and went on with the school day.

After what seemed like an eternity, and in reality was probably about an hour, a friend of my mother’s happened to walk down the hallway. I was sitting silently with tears running down my face, humiliated and terrified, facing the classroom in which every eye kept flitting to me as if I were a magnet. It must have been an odd scene, and she immediately rushed to my side and asked what had happened. I tried to tell her, between sobs, but the teacher almost immediately intervened. She ran into the room and physically pushed herself between us, saying, “Calah is not allowed to speak for the rest of the day. After school is over I will take her to the principle’s office and ensure that she is properly punished.”

My mom’s friend didn’t respond. She just looked at the teacher, shocked and confused, and left. As soon as she got home (this was the pre-cell phones era, you understand) she called my mom, who immediately jumped in the car to find out what was wrong.

My dear mother rushed into the building like an avenging fury. Her face was white and her forehead pinched, but it was her eyes that I noticed first. If ever I’ve seen someone’s eyes flash fire, my mom’s eyes did on that day.

I don’t know what was said between her and the teacher, because it was said out of my hearing, but afterward my mother grabbed my hand and whisked me out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs and into the car. Without a word, without even waiting for my trembling hands to fasten my seatbelt, she jerked the car into gear and sped, as only my mother can speed, over to the main campus of our school, about five miles away.

She screeched into the parking lot and jumped out, commanding me to stay in my seat. It was the first thing she’d said to me.

By this point, I was beyond terrified. I was petrified into absolute stillness. Even my mind was still, stuck on one revolving question. Is Mommy mad at me? Is Mommy mad at me?

I guess I thought that I had done something unforgivable. Maybe my brain short-circuited a little when I threw that right hook, but I saw my teacher angry and my mom angry and I thought, I’ve done it this time. 

After a while, my mom walked out of the principal’s office, followed by our wonderful principle. They were walking slowly and talking, and my mom’s hands were making big gestures. She kept shaking her head. Finally the principle put her arm around my mom’s shoulders and gave her a hug, then turned around and walked back inside. My mom stood outside the car for a moment, then slowly opened the door, climbed in, and started the car.

I shrank in my seat a little and stared hard at my hands, waiting for the car to move. It didn’t. There we sat with the engine idling, until I finally worked up the guts to look over at my mom.

She was crying.

I will never forget the shock and alarm I felt when I saw my mom sitting behind the wheel, her hands covering her face, her shoulders shaking, and tears running out from beneath her fingers. My mom is one tough lady. She doesn’t cry often, and this was the first time I’d ever seen her cry. I felt like the foundation of my world had crumbled beneath me, because my mom couldn’t be crying.

I managed to squeak out, “Mom? Are you mad at me?”

My mom lowered her hands and looked at me incredulously. She gave me a watery smile and reached over to grab my hand. “Of course I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at your teacher. I’m furious at your teacher, actually.”

She wiped her eyes and put the car in gear, and just before she pulled out of the parking lot she said, “I’m proud of you, Calah. You did just what I told you to do.”

I was silent for a long time after that. It seemed a solemn moment, somehow. A moment in which I understood something which I hadn’t understood before.

That was a serious kind of love that my mother had for me. A kind of love that I couldn’t comprehend at the time, although I certainly felt the weight of it. Over the years that followed, I wasn’t always the child that needed protecting. Often I was the one in the wrong, and my mother’s anger, at those times, really was directed at me. But it sprang from the same place. All her anger rose out of love for me. She loved me so much that she wanted to protect me, even from myself.

I’ve begun to realize that a mother’s love can be a dangerous thing. When we were growing up, my mother was always very careful never to show us favoritism. She and my dad often coached our Little League teams, and they were invariably harder on us than anyone else. Remembering that example, when Sienna was younger and began playing with other children I tried to do the same. But I did it badly. I was quick to defend the other child and punish mine, even when I hadn’t seen what had happened. Sienna learned at a young age that I was far from just, that blaming and punishing her were practically knee-jerk reactions for me. And so she stopped trusting me. She began hiding things, lying to me. Even now we battle this, as I try to prove to her that I can be just, that I can listen and understand, and that she needs to tell me the truth.

My father-in-law is fond of saying that all sin springs from inordinate love. I agree. I know that when I fail my children, because fail them I will, it will sometimes be because I love them too much. I’ll love them so much that I won’t be able to bear punishing them for something they deserve punishment for, or I’ll love them so much that I’ll pretend not to notice when they push the limits, or I’ll love them so much that I’ll over correct and be mean and harsh with them out of fear that they will never learn to be good. But sometimes it will be because I love myself too much. I’ll ignore misbehavior so I can finish a blog post. I’ll let them have chocolate before lunch because I’d like some myself. I’ll threaten without follow-through because I want good behavior now, without having to deal with the consequences later. There is a fine tightrope of balance to walk when one wishes to love correctly, and I know I’ll never stay on the whole way across.

Although I often pray for the wisdom to love my children the right way, at night when they’re sleeping and I hover over them, taking in their innocent faces and their lovely, care-free brows, my thoughts inevitably wander back to that day so many years ago, when my mother cried.

I never forgot that day. The impression it left on me was deep and permanent. That was the day I understood that my mother’s love knew no bounds, that it was endless and eternal. That knowledge stayed with me. Later in life, when I stood with trembling knees to confess yet another wrong, it was only the knowledge of that love that kept me steady. If I hadn’t known the extent of my mother’s love for me, I might not have had the courage to come to her when I was wrong, to cry on her shoulder, to let her bind my wounds and prop me up as I tried to find myself again.

More than anything else, I pray that I am able to show my children that same love. I pray that they will know, as surely as I did, that my love for them will never cease. That nothing they can do will ever exhaust it. That the worst sin in the world will never shake the foundation of my love for them, nor my faith that they can be better.