Happy Birthday Mom

Tomorrow is my Mother’s birthday. I’m going home to be with Dad, Steve and Lesley that day, which will be difficult for all of us (and for Ron, who will be in New Orleans).

As ever I’ve been thinking a lot of Mom, the life she led and who she was. Her biography alone is compelling. She was born in Siloam Springs, Arkansas as the sixth of six children to the Mayor/Police Chief of the town. They moved to Galena Park, Texas when she was a little child, to a small house. Times were very tough; Mom milked a cow each day and wore clothes that Grandma made from potato sacks. Even at an early age she was enormously popular and liked by many. She was an officer on the high school drill team, and an active member of Galena Park Baptist Church. She started school at Sam Houston State, but did not finish so she could get married. She raised three boys, while taking care of our family’s rental home business. She taught Sunday School and ran the church nursery. Later she ran the church prayer room and was in charge of the “greeters.” As I previously posted, she made numerous mission trips abroad. After we left home, she became a teacher’s assistant at several of the local elementary schools, often working with special needs students. She also ran the church’s Mother’s Day Out program.

That description barely scratches the surface of who she was, which was the most remarkable person I’ve ever met. Kingwood First Baptist Church, 25 miles from downtown Houston, was packed on a Friday morning for her funeral. I have seen Easter Sunday services at that church with fewer in attendance. Most of them had met her, many knew her, and nearly all knew something about her. But who Mom was could only be hinted at in the time available. Many who had known her for years couldn’t have known the full story, as they hadn’t known her for her entire life. Despite some misgivings about doing this publicly, I would like to make an inadequate attempt to paint a fuller picture because so many of you hadn't known about a number of facets of her. Mom said she really enjoyed reading my blog, so I don't think she'd mind.

To begin with, she was the most beautiful person I’ve ever known. The most obvious facet of her beauty was physical. Mom was extraordinarily beautiful (see picture above). There are many pictures of her on the funeral home web site, and I’ve put a few more on flickr (for a short while), under “Mom.” Mom won a number of beauty contests around town. When we were kids Mom spent a lot of the day running errands all over town, so she took us with her everywhere, and to every store. This is back when most store clerks were men…we never had to wait for service. We always seemed to get little freebies, or to get the extra service I’ve never gotten on my own. My favorite story about Mom involves the time she and Steve visited me at UT. I was driving them down the Drag one evening on the way to eat at Trudy’s. We were having some sort of inane conversation with some mild “trash talk,” and I remarked that I didn’t think Steve was very good looking. Mom took great offense to this, saying that Steve was good looking because he was her child and she was good looking. I was a little surprised to hear this, and said that Mom wasn’t good looking either (remember, this was just joking around), which made her reply indigantly “I am too!” At that exact moment, a carload of four college guys pulled up beside us, rolled their window down, and started whistling and hollering to Mom. With an absolute deadpan expression, she looked at them (saying nothing), turned to me and said “See, I am good looking!” That’s what kids now call getting served.

But well beyond her physical beauty was the inner beauty that gave her an absolutely riveting personality. Mom was exceptionally friendly. I personally have seen her have phone conversations with wrong numbers…several times. We were always the last ones to leave church or any other meeting. If she did have to stand in line, she would know everyone in the line by the time she made it to the counter, and usually would know the person at the counter too. If you lived in Kingwood and didn’t know (or at least hadn’t heard of) Mom, it was either because you had just moved there or you were a shut in. Once I went with her and another friend to a neighborhood Starbuck’s, next to a grocery store, where we sat at a table outside. For nearly two hours, people coming to the store or to the Starbuck’s made their way to our table to say hello to Mom. It was like a Queen receiving guests at court. Sometime soon before I left for college, I noticed that when my friends came to my house to visit, they usually blew right past me to talk to Mom.

That friendliness came from being happy. Many of you have mentioned her ever-present smile, the brilliance of which was unmatched. I can hardly picture Mom without that smile. The smile could brighten any room, and it came from within. She loved life, she loved the people in it, and she loved her place in life. Mom could find the silver lining in anything. She very much understood depression, but would always tell me to “just think happy thoughts.” Fewer have mentioned her distinctive voice. A friend of Ron’s who attended Julliard once taped her speaking to demonstrate an authentic southern accent to the other students. Some think its unusual quality was just an accent; in reality, it was just the voice of a happy person.

Its important to know that her happiness came from her love of Jesus. She was an extremely committed Christian, and knew that she was very blessed. She devoted a great deal of her life to the church, as I noted above. It was far more than simply going to church; it was her life. She found blessings in everything, and looked to the Bible for comfort and counsel on how to live her life. Some people’s faith leads them to criticize or find fault, but with Mom it inspired her only to love others and to live knowing that Jesus loved her and would take her to heaven to be with Him. Very recently, Mom told Dad she thought that God liked her, which is unusual because you generally hear people talk about God loving them. Mom just thought of it as such a close relationship that God not only loved her, but liked her too.

Part of that happiness also came from having so much love in her life. Mom was capable of extraordinary love, and loved many, many people. While heartache and hurt sometimes dulls peoples’ emotions, something about her never lost the capacity to love with all her heart. She clearly did love her husband and kids and later daughters in law deeply and unquestioningly. She loved her many close friends, her church, and the various others whom she “collected” through the years. For those whom she loved, she was fiercely loyal and would do anything in her power. Mom always fought for us, always stood up for us, always took our side, and was always proud of us. Mom certainly gave advice, if asked, but never, ever was discouraging or down. We always tried to get her nice presents, but really we could have gotten her an empty box and she would have thought it was the greatest thing ever just because it was from one of us.

From that love, and her fundamental honesty, also came responsibility. If Mom said she was going to do something, it would be done. There was never any question of her having forgotten, or not getting around to it, or changing her mind, or not trying very hard. Mom saying she would do something was a guarantee; her word was AAA rated. When she made a commitment, she went way beyond the extra mile to fulfill it. I saw her in the intensive care unit, just a few hours after having had a heart attack and an angiogram, calling her greeter volunteers to make sure the church would have enough greeters that coming Sunday (I made her stop that, but even then she wouldn’t stop until she found someone else who would make the calls). She took care of my grandmother after Grandma’s fall, and took care of my Dad’s Grandma Seixas late in her life as well. When my cousin Debbie, with whom my Mom was exceptionally close, died in Orlando, Mom flew to Orlando and took care of all arrangements when her parents were (understandably) incapable of doing so. My brother Ron has had many medical and insurance issues through the years, but Mom spent hour after hour finding him the best doctors and pulling all kinds of strings to get insurance to pay. Mom always found a way to provide for any lesson, practice, meeting, or event we wanted to pursue or attend. She insisted we get the finest medical care to be had, and figured out a way to pay for it, then would overwhelm the doctor with the meticulous notes she had taken on our condition to help get an accurate diagnosis. She managed our rent house business for years, at one point taking care of 10 houses while raising three boys. She helped arrange jobs for friends and friends’ kids. She made it to nearly every friend’s shower, wedding, and baptism. She was there when her friends were sick, or needed a favor. She stayed with me and my brothers through every major illness or surgery. I never, ever heard her ask what was in it for her, or complain that no one ever did for her; it would have been unfathomable to her not to do these things because she couldn’t imagine not helping someone she loved.

Yet, Mom was a lot of fun, and loved to have fun. She always took us to the zoo, or the Battleship Texas, or putt putt golf, or Peppermint Park, or the like. She loved going to ball games, movies and shows, going out to eat, to Starbucks, traveling, parties. Mom really liked to go to the Fourth of July fireworks and to see Christmas lights. When I was little, we would go to Hobby Airport to watch planes land and take off (way before 9/11 of course). She always made sure we had fun birthday parties, long before the current trend of suburban parents trying to turn their own kids’ birthday parties into a competition with the other neighborhood parents. When it came out, I took Mom to see Elf, with Will Farrell and never saw her laugh harder. She just loved “that silly elf.” She really loved the movie Grease too. She took us all with her to see it when the movie came out in 1978, and paid full price, which I remember as being a big deal (because we didn’t exactly have tons of money). She just loved that it was about the 50s. The point is that although these things sound simple, Mom had fun doing just about anything. As long as she could be doing something with friends or with us, she was very happy.

Despite all these qualities, Mom was an exceptionally strong person. She was strong in her beliefs, strong in her conviction, and unshakeable in her determination. Hard times that would have rendered most of us incapable of going on hardly affected her. Deaths, sickness, injury…she went through it all. I’ve seldom seen anyone calmer or more capable in a crisis than Mom. It was almost a pleasure to watch her work through such situations; the worst part about having to endure her passing and dealing with all the complicated arrangements to be made was not being able to rely on her advice and strength.

The last thing to add is Mom’s greatest gift, which was her love and special affinity for children. Have you ever seen Jordan play basketball, seen Olivier play Hamlet, or listened to Sinatra sing? Watching my Mom with children was pretty much the same thing. Most of her life was devoted to helping children, all around the world. I’ve seen many pictures of her as a child and youth, and many show her holding her little nieces and nephews. She was very close to many of them, who thought of her as more than just their Aunt Birdie. As I said, most of my own friends would blow right past me on their way to see Mom; my whole life, my own friends preferred her company to mine (and I can’t blame them). For years, she led a class at the church which was for young children that had just joined, but who didn’t fully understand their decision. Although the class had a real name, it was always called “Miss Birdie’s class.” Little children would call my Dad “Mister Birdie.” As I stated last time, generations of kids that grew up in Kingwood were raised in Miss Birdie’s class. Even after she stopped teaching, when the kids would walk past her Mother’s Day Out or Prayer Room office she would be sure to be in the hall to say hi, and always knew every one of their names (and they knew her). Children around Mom always seemed to have a special light in their eye just being around her. I have a friend whose four kids met Mom once, several years ago, and they still talk about her and were very upset to hear when she died. Children who had just met her would hug her. In looking through pictures, I have seen many taken on mission trips, with dozens of kids mobbing Mom and trying to touch her, even though they couldn’t understand her words, just because they somehow knew she loved them and cared about them. Her favorite Bible verse was Matthew 19:14, which is “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’” I am pretty sure her favorite song was Jesus Loves the Little Children. That quality clearly was a gift, and arose from the fact that she remained young at heart her whole life. She was the world’s oldest 12 year old girl.

Mom’s favorite book, which she gave to all of us, was “I’ll Love You Forever.” Its very short, about a mother who always said that to her son throughout her whole life, as they both grew older. Eventually when the mother is too old and sick to say it anymore, the son says that to her. After Mom read that book, she signed every card, note, and e-mail she ever sent us with the line “I’ll love you forever.” That perfectly captures Mom.

So happy birthday Mom. I’ll love you forever.