It's in their blood

Last week, a gaggle of busy movers descended on our house—my mother, grandmother, brother, and father. They brought with them a U-Haul stuffed with a new dining room table, chairs, a piano, and bedroom furniture for the baby. Every night of their stay, my grandmother put on a dinner for nine—all of us plus company. By the time the four of them left, the baby’s room and furniture were freshly painted, the curtains hemmed, the lawn mowed, the garden torn out in time for winter, and the refrigerator stuffed with turkey dinner leftovers. These gifts of service outpaced my capacity for gratitude, and once the relatives had gone I fell promptly into a weeklong nap.

I asked a lady at church last week how my mother and grandmother managed to do so much in a single day. She has known them both for many years and said, “It’s in their blood.” That led me to another question: “If it’s in their blood, why isn’t it in mine?”

The sermon that day hovered around Romans 12:10: “Outdo one another in showing honor.” That verse convicts without explication. But what do you do in a season of life in which you constantly receive—as in the eighth month of pregnancy—and when outdoing isn’t in your power? Further, what do you do when your giftedness does not match the giftedness of the person blessing you?

When I look at my grandmother and mother, factories of endless energy, and then at myself, I really wonder: Is it possible they just don’t make women the way they used to? The same lady I was talking to in church said she knew a woman once who had a baby in the afternoon then went out to milk cows that evening. I can easily imagine my mother or grandmother performing that kind of madness, though they, of course, would deny it.

I love the poem “The Lanyard,” in which American poet Billy Collins describes what he calls a “worn truth”—that no matter how hard you try, you can never, ever repay your mother. Not only that, he exposes the truth in us: Sometimes we barely try to repay her at all. In the poem, Collins takes us back to a summer in his youth. We see him weaving a lanyard for his mother. “She gave me life and milk from her breasts,” he reflects, “and I gave her a lanyard.” And in his characteristic last-line twist, he confesses:

I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

The baby crowding my lungs right now reminds me that I—even I—am about to take the unrepayable path they call motherhood. I admit I’ve wondered if I will ever really be able to do for my child what my mother and grandmother do for me.

But my husband Jonathan reminds me: “They are a force of nature. You have other gifts.” Perhaps only motherhood will show me what they are.