Of Mothers and Blessings
My mother remains on her unreachable plateau, no longer the oversized personality who shaped my early years – not actively dying, but gone away so far into the recesses of the mind that the gentlest touch makes her startle and gasp in fear. Even flowers do not give her pleasure now; there is nothing to send, nothing to say, only the long distance vigil of duty and helpless love. She laughed at something my dad said while he was feeding her breakfast the other day; it was a precious moment, a rare glimmer of connection out of months of fading awareness. I am a bad advertisement for mother’s day, trapped between the familiar ache of my own childlessness, and this strange new slow motion bereavement that can neither mourn nor be comforted.
This week I received an e-mail from someone connected with our congregation, who works with teens. Here is what it said: I have a student that has been bouncing from house to house since February, and we have been calling the Avenues daily for about 2 weeks and some other places. Today when I called, I was one minute late. I’m calling again at noon to make sure the bed was filled. She is staying with a family from the school but they are getting a little burned out. Do you know any foster parents or people that might be willing to make about a 6 month commitment to taking in a super nice girl?
Last week, Carol Koepp and I spent one late afternoon touring the soon to be renovated Youth Opportunity Center, just a few blocks from this building, on north 12th street, where more than 1,000 homeless teenagers in Minneapolis can find food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, child care, and support in facing one of the most vulnerable situations that exists in our city. There are many reasons that young people find themselves homeless. Some “age out” of institutional foster care or federally funded family housing by turning 18. Others may be driven out of their homes due to parental drug or alcohol use, physical or sexual abuse, or mental health issues. Some young people find they cannot function in crowded households that lack the space and resources for older children. Others are homeless due to their own mental health issues or drug or alcohol use. Whatever the cause, it’s a scary world out there when you have no place to call home.
They don’t have the zoning for beds over at 12th street; they don’t have the showers and other facilities that would be needed in order for people to sleep there, and so the kids come for dinner and a place to spend the evening, maybe some help with applying for a driver’s license, or trying to get their GED, maybe working with an artist in residence to create some object or image or words that reflect their experiences, and then they head out to spend the night in shelters if they are lucky, or under bridges, or if they are unlucky, with the predators who always ready to trade a little money or shelter or drugs for access to young bodies. At 12th street, they don’t call it prostitution; they call it survival sex.
So, mother’s day. I am thinking about my mother, suspended between the organic failure of her brain, and the slower deterioration of her body; I am thinking about the children of Minneapolis who have no mothers to speak of. Forgive me if it is not a Hallmark moment. I am thinking about dandelions, those shaggy, unwanted, persistent flowers, as we celebrate the lilacs and roses of our Unitarian Universalist flower festival this morning. Mothers understand about dandelions; toddlers bring them, in chubby fists – something to give, something pretty to share – they don’t know about weeds. The dandelions don’t know that they are weeds, of course; they have no awareness that they are spoiling the green lawn, cracking the sidewalk. They are only obeying the imperative of nature, which is to grow.
It is amazing, the effort that we put into some flowers. Out at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, there is a fabulous rose garden. Every autumn, legions of volunteers come out, to dig trenches, loosen the roots of the rose bushes, and gently tip them into the ground and cover them with soil, so that they will survive our zone 3 winter. In the spring, right about now, those folks come back and lift the bare plants into place, for another season of growing and blooming. That’s what you have to do, if you want tea roses in Minneapolis. But those dandelions, that no one wants – they are unbelievably hardy. There they are, every year, no matter what. Yank at them, poison them, still they show up, with their shaggy leaves and their impertinent sunny yellow faces. Kind of like those teenagers that nobody wants, who keep showing up on the sidewalks of our city, not knowing that they aren’t supposed to be there, not understanding that they aren’t flowers like all the other children.
It’s a crazy world, don’t you think? If nature is our mother, she’s the original dysfunctional parent. Profligate, promiscuous, nurturing brain tumors and emerald ash borers with the same enthusiasm as rainforests and whales. You like the tulips? Let’s have some rabbits, too, and the deer. Let there be acute consciousness in bodies that can no longer function, and other bodies that carry on when the minds that once inhabited them are reduced to randomness. Make how many millions of exquisitely delicate dandelion seeds, to float across the tended acres where no one wants them. Let some dreams of parenthood go forever unfulfilled, while every day fourteen year olds get pregnant, and infants die of neglect, and children uprooted like weeds from a garden wander the streets alone. It’s a crap shoot in nature, this whole business of mothering; any little thing goes wrong, and it will kill you, assuming you’re not the type that eats your young, which kind of makes the whole enterprise pointless. The one thing Mother Nature is not is sentimental; she is not impressed by your red and white carnations, or the earnest crayon drawings of hearts and flowers by five year olds. In the brutal economy of evolution, it makes perfect sense that some offspring are discarded, superfluous, accidental reproductive successes that the genes can’t afford, for whatever reason, to invest in. It’s only human consciousness that attaches moral status to motherhood; that wants to idealize and glorify the work that is necessary to create the next generation and get it ready to function effectively in the world. It’s only in human consciousness that principles like the inherent worth and dignity of every person exist, and it is human consciousness that motivates the folks who sustain the organization YouthLink. They are the people who run that Youth Opportunity Center on 12th Street, so that the discarded children of our community might, with great effort and determination, access some of the resources that are routinely available to their more privileged peers.
How many of them are there, these homeless teens, in our city? It’s a simple enough question, but the answer is anything but simple. What do you mean by homeless? The ones who are turned away by the shelters on any given night? Over the course of the winter, it’s in the hundreds. Those who at some time during the year access the services at YouthLink? About 1200. But experts in the Minneapolis area school systems estimate that at any moment about 5,500 of the students enrolled are homeless or ‘unaccompanied minors’; which is to say that there is no adult responsible for them. Especially in the suburbs, this is hard to track, because a teen who has lost both parental connections and secure housing is usually desperate to maintain the only stable relationship they have, which is their school. If they admit that they have no fixed address in that district, they fear, with some justification, that they will find themselves assigned to a different school, with strange teachers and counselors, separated from their friends. Like dandelions, they expose cracks in the smooth façade of suburban communities; they are not supposed to be there. The solution of first resort is usually what case workers call ‘couch-hopping’; staying with friends’ families for a week or two, as long as they are tolerated, and then rotating on to the next friend’s family room sofa until that welcome also wears itself out. Sometimes they can keep this up long enough actually to graduate, but that in itself is no magic, happily ever after deal. More often, though, they run out of friends, or at least friends’ parents’ patience, before they run out of school. Then it’s in their cars, if they are lucky enough to have one, or the shelters, or the busses, or the streets. Makes it hard to study, let alone produce a term paper, or a college application.
Why do we care? Well, apart from the fact that any human suffering we have the power to prevent ought to be prevented, we Minnesotans have collectively formulated an audacious commitment to end homelessness in our state by 2020. And ending homelessness among children, teens, and young adults is one of the best investments in that project. In sheerly mathematical terms, getting a young person securely housed has the potential to prevent fifty or more person-years of future homelessness, besides which it opens all the possibilities of productive, law-abiding, tax-paying, home-owning, PTA-belonging, stable family building citizenship to that person. The return on our present investment in ending the vicious cycle of homelessness for teenagers is almost incalculable.
And the truth is that for all their outward adolescent jadedness, homeless teens are some of the most poignantly idealistic people you will ever encounter. Read their poetry, see the images they create in any art form; listen, as the world too seldom listens, to them describe their dreams, and they will break your heart. In all the world, they are the people who best understand the importance of what families might be to each other; who know the value of the simplest possessions and safeties that the rest of us take for granted. In a sad way, this is their great vulnerability, that they are so easily preyed upon by anyone who will offer them any ersatz affection, or promise them any security, however unrealistic. Of course, their educations and marriages and careers are at risk from the less than positive models they have to build on, and the chances that they will struggle with some of life’s challenges are high, even with all the help that anyone can give them. Yet without help, they may not live to struggle at all, between the perils of street violence, of drug and alcohol dangers and sexually transmitted diseases, and the ever-present urge to resolve the sense of unwantedness and worthlessness through suicide. Or if they do survive, it may be the stunted life of prison, or the dream-deadening twilight of chronic homelessness, addiction, and depression that passes the legacy of despair on to another generation.
This isn’t rocket science, you know. The most important part is the simplest; it’s just one question, the same for all of us, really -- does anybody care? Once you have that – some adult, some teacher, some case worker, some coach or counselor who genuinely believes in you – it’s mostly money. All the things that parents and families normally pay for, or that get covered by baby-sitting money or part time jobs when you already have meals and a roof over your head; it’s flu shots and pregnancy tests and school books and a new pair of shoes and bus fare and the application fee for college or trade school or the GED test. It’s a little bit of money, and a steep learning curve; how do you cook, how do you keep house, how do you open a bank account, how do you apply for a job, if you have never watched anyone do those things competently? How do you know what matters, what is worth waiting for, who to trust, which of your contradictory adolescent impulses to heed, if the most familiar answers haven’t worked out that well for the people you know best? It’s actually amazing, and a bit humbling, how resilient these young people can be, how open they are to the thought of lives that might be different, if they have the chance.
That was part of the struggle for my mother, I think; perhaps it’s part of the challenge for all of us in the work of mothering, that the essence of it is to want our children’s lives to be better and happier than our own. If only we could pass along the wisdom of our own mistakes; if only we could save our offspring from the pain of our most difficult lessons in life. It can’t be done, of course, at least never as fully as we would wish; you can give a hint, here and there, and maybe something sticks, but mostly our kids turn out a lot like us; not what we told them to be, but what we are, because both our example and our love are so much more powerful than our advice.
So what about those throw-away children, whose parental mirrors are empty, whose only example is negative, or absence? I suspect what happens is that they become what we are collectively, a lot like our society as a whole. If that culture is caring, and generous, and responsive to them, then that’s the kind of people they have the option to grow into, even starting with a certain amount of deficit. If, on the other hand, all that we reflect to them is the same neglect and indifference and unworthiness that landed them in the cruel dilemma of homelessness in the first place, then there is little reason to hope that the cycle of dysfunction can be broken. There are people who do this work, day in and day out, 24-7, which as anyone who has ever made a difference in a teenager’s life knows, is when you have to be there for them. Carol and I met some of them, last week, at the Center; they are amazing folks; they are heroes; they are angels in denim and body art. Men and women, gay and straight, nurses, teachers, social workers, clerks, cooks – they are what mother’s day is really all about. They are on the front lines, but they can’t do this work alone; they need us to have their backs. After all, if it takes a village to raise a child, can it take anything less to lift a child out of abuse and abandonment and despair, to restore that young person’s hope, and faith in people, and dreams for their future?
It is told that one came to the Prophet and said, “My mother has died. What shall I do for the good of her soul?” The Prophet thought of the panting heat of the desert and said, “Dig a well, that the thirsty may have water to drink.” The man dug the well, and said, “This I have done for my mother.”
My mother. My mother has not died, yet on this Mother’s Day her spirit is gone from me, to a distant shore where I may not follow, and so I ponder, What shall I do for the good of her soul? I think of the streets of this city, and their perils for those teens who find themselves alone and vulnerable. It is not a well that needs digging, but I can make the work of those who reach out to the lost, discarded, dandelion children easier and more fruitful just by writing a check. If she were able to understand what I am doing, I think my mother would be pleased; I think she would know that I am honoring the best of what she has meant to me, of what we have been to each other.
We come together this morning bringing the flowers that represent our presence and our contribution to the beauty and diversity of this spiritual community. In a few moments, you will be presented with a flower to take away with you, representing the gifts that are given and received here in our life together. If you would like to share with me in honoring the memory of your mother, or celebrating her living example, by making a gift to the YouthLink Youth Opportunity Center, I invite you to take a dandelion as well the more elegant flower you will be handed by the person ahead of you in line. There are envelopes available at the Social Action table for donations of money, or you can volunteer at the Center, or you can open your home as a foster family for a young person whose only link to a stable world may be a school near you. “Do you know any people that might be willing to make about a 6 month commitment to taking in a super nice girl?” It is not an impossible ambition, to eliminate teen homelessness in Minnesota; it just needs all of us to believe that it can be done, and to pitch in to make it happen.
No child in this city is a weed; no young person is dispensable, or unworthy of our collective concern. If Mother’s Day doesn’t mean that, then it is a fraud, a wholly owned subsidiary of commercial conventions and fantasies. Every girl and boy who wanders our downtown streets today, wondering where they will sleep tonight, is well aware of what day it is, I promise you. They could tell us something about the complexities of mothers, I imagine; probably things that most of us have never had occasion to contemplate. They know what motherhood means, perhaps, by the shape of the hollow place in their lives and hearts. True motherhood is not an accident of biology, as those who would solace my own barrenness are wont to remind me. True motherhood is the delicate, sacrificial, faithful work of tending the next generation, making sure that the needs of the young are not overlooked in the rush of things, guiding our children as best we can through the risks and hurdles of maturing into adulthood. Not everyone who gives birth is up to the task; that’s why if human consciousness means what it says about inherent worth and dignity, and honor for the work of motherhood, the rest of us need to pick up the slack, so that no child fades to grey and blows away on the winds of despair in the garden of our community.
A line from the closing words of the memorial service haunts me these days, “The love that we can no longer give to our beloved, may we give instead to those who have need of it.” There is little I can do for my mother on this Mother’s Day; then let me share my gratitude for mothering with those who most have need of it. The flowers of our friendship with one another here in this covenant community are indeed beautiful, and I rejoice in partaking of that beauty with you. But the faith we share calls upon us to bless not just each other, but a larger, and needier, world. If love is truly the spirit of this church, it must reach out beyond the circle of ourselves, to fulfill for those who have far more reason than we to doubt it, the promise that life is truly a blessing. Let us sing together, and welcome our children as they return to their place among us.
