Remembering Those Who Mother Us
Like many women, I had a complicated relationship with my mother. It was only perhaps in the last five years of her life that we finally, happily began to understand each other.
My mother was nearly 40 when I was born. Fearing something would go wrong with the birth, she prayed throughout her pregnancy to St. Jude, the patron of hopeless cases. When I was born healthy and grew into a curious, rambunctious child, my mother responded by becoming intensely protective. I could only ride my bike within one block of our house and sometimes my play area was confined to the backyard.
I attribute this rather circumscribed childhood to fueling my wanderlust later in life which drove me to live in three foreign countries and travel much of the world — something that ever mystified my mother who had left the U.S. only once, on a bus trip to Canada.
Yet it was my mother who gave me the gift that set my trajectory in life. When I was 13, she took a job in a food factory to pay for my tuition at a Catholic girls’ academy — something the family could never have afforded on my father’s truck driver’s salary.
For her, it meant going back to work after being out of the workforce for nearly 20 years. It was a dismal job that required her to stand on a wet concrete floor for hours on end, cleaning and cutting up cucumbers. Because of her sacrifice, I was able to receive a classical education that exposed me to art, music, foreign languages, and creative writing and instilled in me a lifelong love of the humanities.
And speaking of good mothering, I also received a generous helping of it from the Sisters of Charity of New Jersey who taught me at the Academy of St. Aloysius. Because of them, I attended my first live ballet and opera and was able to travel to France and Italy in my junior year in high school. The sisters nurtured my dream of becoming a writer.
Later in life, I was blessed to encounter the Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Atchison, KS. They showed me a way of living that stresses community over competition, consensus over conflict, simplicity over consumption, humility over self-aggrandizement and silence over the constant distractions that infiltrate our days.
Most importantly, they taught me it’s not what you say that counts the most, it’s how well you listen.
Catholic sisters, of course, forgo the privilege of marrying and raising a family of their own. But by their teaching, mentoring and modeling, they are mothers to many. I am blessed to consider myself one of their daughters.
I wrote the poem “Conjugating” for my mother, Theresa Costanza Valente. She died, in 2001, before I could show it to her. “Conjugating” appears in my poetry collection “Discovering Moons” and was included in Loyola Press’ anthology, “Best Catholic Writing.” It speaks of the kind of sacrifices so many mothers make for their children.
The poem ends appropriately with the verbs in Latin for “to love.” “Amo, amas, amat.” May you see the love of your own mother in mine.
“Conjugating”
I was the only public
that September at St. Aloysius
third desk from last
in the alphabet outskirts of class,
only Jane Zaccaro,
Barbara Zombrowski
farther asea.
My body a stranger
in alien clothes:
pleated skirt, white knee socks,
Peter Pan collar
buttoned to the neck.
In freshman art
Mrs. Cirone asked us
to observe a beechwood,
describe what we saw
and some said summer,
others said nature,
I said the branches
were the serpent tresses
of Medusa — we had read
Bulfinch’s Mythology
in Sister Helen Jean’s
Latin class –
Mary Smith grimaced,
Doris Crawford then
Maureen Jennings snickered,
their laughter spread,
washed over the waste baskets,
George Washington’s portrait,
The crucifix above
the blackboard in Room 202.
I wanted to run from that place
in my stiff new regulation loafers
from the girls who lived
in stone houses on Bentley
and Fairmont Avenues,
summered at Avon-by-the-Sea,
knew by heart the Apostles Creed,
the Joyful, Sorrowful
and Glorious Mysteries,
but I knew my mother
at that moment stood ankle-
deep in red rubber boots
in a pool of gray water
hosing down cucumbers
at Wachsberg’s Pickle Works
so she could earn $1.05 an hour
squirrel away a few dollars
each week to pay my $600 tuition
and at three o’clock
when Sam Wachsberg blew
his plastic whistle, remove the boots
pack up her lunch sack,
take home the Broadway bus
smelling of sweet relish,
pickled onions,
while the school kids sniffed
her clothes, laughed
behind her back.
I learned to calculate the square root
of a hundred twenty seven
memorized the Holy Sonnets,
the symbols of the elements,
mastered each declension
and conjugation:
amo, amas, amat
