Our poor mothers and others

The two good things about being freaked out over finances while also living in a mean, mean age pockmarked by war and poverty is that you may suddenly know niceness when you see it, and you may see the potential for poverty being a virtue.

Two things happened recently that served as smelling salts to my disheartened self. The first, a nice guy died. The second, my mother came for a visit.

Be nice. We demand that of our children. When they ask why there are wars, we explain to them that it’s because some people aren’t nice and that these mean people are fighting over money and power.

Still, niceness can be viewed as Jello nailed to a tree. It doesn’t stick. At worst, amidst the sharp-elbowed crowd of other human qualities such as firmness, self-assuredness and certainty, niceness seems unable to defend itself. How did this happen to nice?

I’m thinking a lot about nice lately because a nice guy has died. You don’t know him. He wasn’t famous. His name was Jack. His body was buried last month. As usually happens upon the death of someone dearly loved, people cried -- not for him, but for themselves because of the loss of him in their lives.

These are the facts of his life: He didn’t gossip. He didn’t say unkind things about others (politicians being the exception). He volunteered for the activities that keep a community together – the pancake breakfasts and church functions. He would always ask “How are you doing?” and he really wanted to know. He asked in such a way that it put you off guard. You paused to consider: Hmm, how am I doing? And if you weren’t okay, you soon would be because you were in the presence of nice, and nice — his version of genuine, indisputable, immutable niceness — is the redoubtable shine of a complex character-compound comprised of sensitivity and humility.

He was curious. He could tell you obscure facts about Native American tribes and campaigns of the Civil War in Appalachia that only the trees still whisper about. He wasn’t driven by success or by personal ambition. He loved his family above all else. Because he was nice, people that didn’t know him probably mistook him for being soft or weak. That’s because we don’t understand nice. Nice guys don’t finish last. Like Jack, they’ve “won” long before the game even begun. It’s nice to know that niceness can have its day.

Now, let’s turn to poverty. Ask a young person what they want to be when they grow up and notice that no one ever says they want to be poor. And why would they? It’d be idiotic to expect them to. Plus, poverty carries a social stigma. It suggests failure.

Still, it all makes me think of our poor mothers. Yes — our poor mothers. These are the facts about motherhood as I know them to be based on the two mothers whom I know very well: my own mother and the mother of my son. Both embrace a form of poverty and self-denial out of love for their offspring, and both show how poverty can be a virtue.

My mother’s recent visit got me thinking of the thousand examples of how she lived a form of poverty so that her offspring would receive nourishment, moral guidance, and material and emotional security. Even in just little ways. She always took the burnt hamburger, or the smallest serving, or the piece of cake that fell on the floor. She collected spare change in an Ernest and Julio Gallo wine jug. She rolled the change each winter and used it to purchase Christmas gifts.

In too many ways to say, my wife embraces similar qualities of self sacrifice, a form of poverty, too, beginning nine years ago when we learned she was pregnant. Like many women today, she gave up a career to be a mother. She gave up her freedom. She sleeps the least. She does the most. My poor mother: She considers herself the richest woman in the world. My poor wife: She, too, considers herself the richest woman in the world.

Thank God that God favors the weak and lowly over the proud, powerful, and wealthy. Thank God that a rich life can best be attained not in the places of power and in the possessions and obsessions of the material world, but rather through simplicity and selflessness.

Events in the world continue to get a bit too Old Testamenty for comfort. As the anawim – the poor Hebrews of the Old Testament – may have said it, it’s either Yahweh or the highway. As I hope children today might say it, mean people need to be nice, and we all need to be more like our poor mothers.