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<\/a><\/p>\nFor most of us, our mothers are our first teachers. I can\u2019t ever remember my mother saying \u201chey John, come over here \u2013 I\u2019ve got something I want to teach you.\u201d But I learned so much just from listening to her, watching her, and being around her. And so I want to tell you three things my mother taught me.<\/p>\n
My mother taught me to manage money.<\/p>\n
My father had many skills, but money management wasn\u2019t one of them. And so sometime before I was born, my parents came to an agreement. My father would bring his paycheck home, sign it and hand it to my mother. She would take it to the bank, hold out enough cash to give them both an allowance, and deposit the rest in the checking account. Bills would come in the mail \u2013 she put them in the letter file next to the telephone on the kitchen wall. Some of you may remember that phone, but I doubt you remember the letter file. I do.<\/p>\n
Then after payday she\u2019d take out all the bills, open them up, and start writing checks. I watched her pay the electric bill, the water bill, the doctor bill. This was before ordinary people had MasterCard and Visa, but we had Penney\u2019s and Sears. She would look at the statement, look at the checkbook, and decide how much she could pay on them. I remember how happy she was when she could pay them off.<\/p>\n
When I got out on my own I did pretty much the same things, and I still do, because my mother taught me to manage money.<\/p>\n
My mother taught me to respect women.<\/p>\n
One of the checks my mother wrote every month was to the little Baptist church where we went. And because this was a small independent Baptist church, the first Wednesday of every month was business meeting. I didn\u2019t want to be there, but I was there, and I paid attention. And so I knew the treasurer did for the church pretty much what my mother did for our family \u2013 count the money, put it in the bank, pay the bills, sketch out a budget and make sure we didn\u2019t spend more than we had. At one point the treasurer either died or moved away, and I told my mother \u201cyou should be the church treasurer.\u201d<\/p>\n
My mother laughed. And it wasn\u2019t a funny laugh. I\u2019ll never forget what she said: \u201cthe men of that church would never let a woman manage the church\u2019s money.\u201d And I was genuinely confused \u2013 why not? I may have been 8 or 10, but I could see that being treasurer only required two things. You had to be good at basic math. I was really good at math, but most of the other kids in my class who were good at math were girls. And two, you had to be responsible and honest \u2013 and that doesn\u2019t have anything to do with gender either.<\/p>\n
Now, my mother had no desire to be church treasurer \u2013 that was one more headache she didn\u2019t need. But the fact that she couldn\u2019t be church treasurer made me mad. It wasn\u2019t fair didn\u2019t and it didn\u2019t make sense. This was the early 1970s, and every time I heard someone say \u201cgirls can\u2019t play sports\u201d or \u201cwomen can\u2019t fly fighter jets\u201d or \u201ca woman can\u2019t be President\u201d I heard the men of that church telling my mother she couldn\u2019t be treasurer, and I got mad all over again. I\u2019ve always tried to do better over the years, because my mother taught me to respect women.<\/p>\n
My mother showed me God.<\/p>\n
My father like to talk about his religion (I may have inherited a bit of that). But my mother was no less devout, no less committed to her religion, to her faith, than he was, even though she didn\u2019t talk about it. She just lived it.<\/p>\n
I watched her care for my father\u2019s mother in her final days. She did the same thing for her father, and then later when her mother got cancer. She nursed my father back from three heart attacks. She took care of my brothers when they couldn\u2019t take care of themselves.<\/p>\n
The church taught me about God the Father. She showed me God the Mother, loving her children unconditionally, and never ever turning her back on them.\u00a0My mother showed me God.<\/p>\n
My mother was a very private person, and not just with her religion. But sometimes, when it was just the two of us, she\u2019d lower her guard and talk about her life and her dreams. When she was a little girl she wanted to be a missionary to China. She admitted she had no desire to be a missionary, but she wanted to go to China, and in the 1930s the only way anybody she knew got to China was as a missionary.<\/p>\n
She worked as an airbrush artist, doing portrait reproductions in the pre-Photoshop era. She loved to draw and paint and she was very good at both. In a different time, under different circumstances, she could have gone to college, gone to art school, and become one of the most important artists of our time.<\/p>\n
Or not \u2013 I don\u2019t know if she would have wanted that. But in a better world she would had that opportunity.<\/p>\n
When I think about the opportunities she didn\u2019t have, it makes me mad. And it makes me feel guilty, because I know I\u2019m one of the primary beneficiaries of the decisions she made, however freely or unfreely they were made.<\/p>\n
In matters like these, at times like this, words are entirely inadequate. And also, words are all we have.<\/p>\n
And so I offer these words: \u201cthank you for being my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Anita Beckett, my mother, died on January 12, 2025, at the age of 93. This is the eulogy I gave at her funeral on Friday, as best I can remember. For most of us, our mothers are our first teachers. I can\u2019t ever remember my mother saying \u201chey John, come over here \u2013 I\u2019ve got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":31397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[4643,4640,91],"class_list":["post-31394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-practice","tag-anita-beckett","tag-eulogies","tag-funerals"],"yoast_head":"\n
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