Coffee with Mom

by Mike Glenn

  If you’re like me, you play a lot of “what if” in your head. As much as I can, I try to anticipate what will happen and think through my response to them. Sometimes, I think through conversations and try to think about how to respond when I’m in a meeting with this person or that committee. I think through what I’ll do if this happens or that happens. More than once in my life, I’ve been able to be prepared for a variety of situations because, believe it or not, I had already thought through what I would do if this or that did happen. When it did, I was ready.

  I never thought through what I would do if Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. My father would never live long enough to face this illness. His heart wouldn’t let him. We’d known for a long time my dad would die of heart disease. One of his doctors told me he was surprised every time he came into his office and was not told my dad had died the night before. I had thought through this scenario. I knew what I would do when I got the phone call to get to Huntsville as fast as I could.

  But not with Mom. How could I have seen it? Her grandmother lived well into her nineties. Her father was in his eighties when he died—and he was a serious smoker for most of his life. None of her relatives had dealt with this. Her sisters were all healthy. My mom would die, one day, but only after a long and adventurous life.

  Do you want to know what scenario I had been thinking about? I was worried Mom was going to live so long she was going to outlive her resources. She and Dad had done well, but there are limits to everything. What would Jeannie and I do if she lived one year, five years, ten years past what she could pay for? What was I going to do if she lived to be ninety? Or one hundred? Mom would tell me she was going to live as long as she could just to annoy me.

  I wasn’t ready when the illness came. I wasn’t ready when she died. For four years, I faced day after day not being ready for what I had to face. What could I have done to get ready? What do I wish I had known? What do I wish someone had told me?

  I wish I had known that on most days, there are no right or wrong answers. There’s only the best you can do. I spent hours and hours and too many sleepless nights trying to figure out what was the best thing to do when there was no “best” way to do it. What if Mom lives here? What if she lives there? In the end, it really didn’t matter.

  I wish someone had told me to act as soon as I saw the first evidence of a problem. Yes, it would have been hard. My mom would have fought me every step of the way, but she fought me anyway. At least if I had acted earlier, I would have had the chance of dealing with my mom while she was still somewhat rational. As it was, I had to make these hard decisions, fight with my mom, and also try to cope with the irrationality of her disease. I’m a natural procrastinator, but I wished someone had told me that actions put off only get more and more difficult by the moment.

  But it is hard to act. The first time you see something off, something out of place, your patient will always have a perfectly logical explanation for why things are the way they are. If a bill is left unpaid, it’s only because she’s been so overwhelmed by her grief. If there’s a scratch on the car, it’s the teenagers in the neighborhood.

  But I knew better. I just couldn’t allow myself to say it. If I spoke the words, everything would change. To be honest, I panicked. I wish someone had told me about that moment when you look at your mom and realize something is wrong and your blood goes cold. You shiver because you’re freezing inside. You tremble, because now, you’re the adult. Now, you’re going to be making the decisions. One moment, your mom makes all the decisions. Then, you’re offering your input to her decisions, and next, you’re making all the decisions and having to totally disregard your mother’s input—something I had never done in my life—because her input is totally incoherent.

  And I mean ALL the decisions. Where she will live, what she will wear, what doctors will treat her, and what treatment she’ll have. There are just some decisions a son shouldn’t have to make for his mother, but you have to make them and make them you will. You do what love requires, and if love requires you to talk to your mom about her problem with incontinence, well, that’s what you do.

  No one can prepare you when you become the adult and your parent becomes the child.

  And you have to do something. I wish someone had told me this earlier . . . and louder. There comes a moment when you have to act. I did act, but I acted much too late. I should have acted and acted decisively much sooner than I did. For one thing, your patient isn’t going to act. They can’t. As far as they know, life is great. There’s nothing wrong at all.

  And it’s not going to get any better. This day is the best day you’ll have.

  I wish someone could have told me that some days are harder than others, but the hard days aren’t the days you expect. Going to doctors’ appointments and expecting bad news—you learn to handle these moments because you expect them. You brace yourself for them.

  The hard moments are when your mom looks like your mom, but then says or does something that reminds you she’s not your mom anymore. You sit next to her and, for the moment, everything looks like it’s supposed to. You allow yourself to relax and think everything is okay. You’re okay. She’s okay, and the two of you are drinking coffee just like you did all of your lives. Then, she’ll say something that will make absolutely no sense and it will hit you. All of your grief will hit you in that moment, and you’ll feel like you’ve been caught by a wave at the beach—one of the waves that sneaks up behind you and throws you against the ocean bottom, turning you over and over and not letting you up.

  Those are bad days. I wish someone had told me there are going to be bad days. Really bad days. You need to have a little space in your calendar to grieve. Not allowing your grief to be expressed means the grief will find another way to be expressed. You’ll find yourself exhausted, unable to sleep, suffering headaches and all kinds of other ailments because your soul is trying to tell you how badly you’re hurting. You have to pay attention to this.

  Coffee with Mom: Savor every moment, even the difficult ones. Moments, sooner or later, all run out.

  I loved people who would walk up and give me a quick hug and just say, “Praying for you and your mom.” They wouldn’t stay long enough for me to say anything back. They wouldn’t ask. They would just love me in the moment and move on. I loved this because, first, I was glad to know someone was thinking about us, and second, there were days when I couldn’t answer. Well, I couldn’t have answered without tearing up. Some days, the emotion would be just under my skin. I was afraid if I was jostled at all, I would dissolve into a puddle of little-boy tears.

  I loved people who loved my mom. As I write this, I have been the pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church for more than twenty-seven years. I love this church, and I love them more for the way they loved my mom. The Nurture Team, the women’s pastoral care ministry of our church, pulled my mother in like she was an honored guest. They welcomed her until the day my mother couldn’t physically or mentally be part of their ministry. On bad days when she couldn’t grasp what they were trying to do, they insisted she play the old hymns for them on a nearby piano. On good days, she worked as hard as they did. She always came away from that moment with stories and laughter. The women let her know she was loved and valued. For many parents the rule is simple: if you love my child, I’ll love you. For children caring for their aging parents, the rule is just as simple, only reversed: Love my mother, and I’ll love you.

  There were several families and individuals who became close to my mom. They would drop by and pick her up to ride off on some grand adventure. She would send me pictures taken at a local museum, standing next to an Elvis statue or sitting in some local barbecue joint listening to bluegrass music. I love these pictures. For just a moment, I had a snapshot of my mom. The mom I used to know. The mom who loved an adventure and seeing new things. She would fade away into the shadows of her illness fast eno
ugh, but for that moment, I would have her back.

  I loved talking to her old friends and her family, especially her sisters. I loved hearing the old stories about who my mom used to be. I wanted all of the stories I could hear. Mom was forgetting them, and I was afraid I would too. So, when someone said, “Did your mom ever tell you about . . . ?” I would say, “no,” even if she had. I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to be sure I hadn’t forgotten any detail. I wanted to be sure the story I heard was the story I remembered. When you’re on this journey, memory can play some funny tricks on you.

  I loved friends who would just listen. Sometimes, you just don’t know what to do next. You need a safe place to lay out all of your options and just work through them one at a time. Some of your ideas won’t work, but some of them will. You’ll need a little time to work through them. You’ll begin to see what’s viable and what’s not pretty quickly, but the last thing you need is someone pointing out all the holes of your thinking. Most of the time, my feelings were so raw, when someone would point out an error, I would get angry. I felt like I was being picked on, like my friends were piling on. Good friends would just listen and then ask, “So, what do you think you’re going to do?”

  I was always glad to hear that people were praying for me, but those who took the time to write a card were especially meaningful. You can hold onto a card. You can pull it out and read it again. If the card is funny, you can laugh again. If the card is meaningful, you can meditate on what it meant to you when you read it and then, when you reread it, the meaning will come back to you, or the meaning will be enhanced as the meaning has changed mainly because you have changed.

  I finally started keeping a journal. I’ve kept a journal for years, but I needed a “Mom Journal.” I needed to keep a detailed record of conversations, observations, and thoughts. I wish I had taken pictures. I wish I had taken pictures of what the house looked like, the small dents and scratches in her car. I wish I had written down every conversation with Mom as soon as they happened. By the time I “found the time,” we’d been through six or seven other conversations. I couldn’t keep track of everything.

  Those tiny moments of self-doubt and confusion were the only thing Mom needed to throw me off the plan or make me look like I was either inept or evil. I wish I had a way, in those moments, to be able to pull out something she couldn’t argue with—like a receipt or a picture. I think that would have helped.

  Or, maybe it wouldn’t have. She was one who would never let reality change her mind.

  Coffee with Mom: Nobody loves her son like a mother. I miss being loved like that. I was always smart, handsome, and strong—and Mom never let me forget it.

  Most of all, I appreciated those friends who knew even though I was sixty-one years old at the time, I was still a nine-year-old little boy inside. There’s something about your mother. It’s doesn’t matter how old she is or how old you are. You’re just nine years old inside. You’re just a little boy who wants his mom to get better, and now knows she never will be.

  She’s gone. Now, you’re the adult. I wish someone had told me it’s really not any fun being an adult.

  Chapter 20

  Loving Your Parents When You Really Don’t Like Them

  Coffee with Mom: “I’ve noticed since I’ve been here, you haven’t preached on honoring your parents.”

  I’ve always been frustrated by the apostle Paul’s instructions to fathers in Ephesians 6. “Fathers,” he writes, “don’t stir up anger in your children” (Eph. 6:4). Some versions translate the verse, “don’t frustrate your children.” Paul seems to be telling fathers, “Listen, your kids will be okay as long as you don’t mess them up.”

  Really, isn’t that disappointing? Don’t we expect something more from Paul? Shouldn’t his teaching to fathers be, well, more inspirational? Wouldn’t we want Paul to say, “Raise up children who are strong in their faith”? Or, “Raise up those who will follow Christ bravely”? We don’t get any of that. All Paul says is, “Dads, don’t mess the kids up.”

  I really didn’t understand this verse until I started teaching at a Tuesday night worship event for young adults at our church called Kairos. Most of these young adults were still in college or just graduating and beginning their careers. The more I got to know them, the more stories I heard, and the more stories I heard, the more this verse made sense.

  A lot of these young adults had difficult relationships with their fathers. Some of them had no relationship at all with their dads. Because of this, they had a hard time understanding the person of God. Anytime I mentioned God loved them like a father, a lot of them would look down. They had been abandoned by their fathers, betrayed by their fathers, even abused by their fathers. Having God love them like that isn’t something they wanted.

  Finally, I began to understand what Paul was talking about. He was simply saying:

  “Fathers, don’t make it hard to believe in God.”

  The most fundamental understanding we have of God is God as Father. If you have a good dad, as I did, then believing God loves you is an easy step to make. When I was little, I announced to my parents, “God had buttons.” What I meant by that was God sat in front of a very large computer, and if He wanted it to rain in Tennessee, He’d press a few buttons, the weather would come up on His screen, and it would rain in Tennessee.

  I know. That’s a rather simple understanding of God, but it made sense to me. Why? Because my father worked on the radar system of the Hawk missile. He had taken me to work and shown me the large radar scopes with flashing green lights on the system. In my little mind, I figured God would have a computer screen like my dad, only it would be a whole lot bigger. For a child, this wasn’t a bad way of thinking.

  But what happens when you don’t have a good father? What happens when you don’t have a good mother?

  And then, what happens when they get sick? What happens when they need you?

  When some of my friends found out I was writing this book, they would tell me, “You’re lucky. You had a great mom and dad. It’s not that way for me.”

  Another friend sent me a text, “Are you going to say anything in your book about what happens when the dad you haven’t seen in twenty years suddenly wants back into your life? I don’t know if I want him back in my life. Is that wrong?”

  The hard choices in life aren’t between good and bad. We do pretty well with those. The hard choices in life are between good and best, bad and worse. Sometimes we fail when we could have chosen best but only choose good, and other times, we can only choose bad and thank God it’s not any worse. Sometimes life doesn’t give you good choices . . . or easy ones either.

  First, let me be forcefully blunt. There are some people who are dangerous. They have done evil in the past, and we have no indication they won’t do evil again. I wish it wasn’t this way, but we live in a very broken world. There are fathers who have abused their daughters. There are mothers who have abused their sons. There are homes filled with violence and addictions whose stories would make Stephen King blush. I know. I’ve seen these families. The children didn’t just leave these homes; they escaped.

  Please hear me. At no time does Jesus expect you to put yourself or your family in danger. Paul reminds us to live in peace with people “as far as it depends on you” (Rom. 12:18). Sometimes, it’s not up to us. Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put back together. There are some relationships and some families that can’t be repaired unless God strikes the home with a bolt of lightning. You shouldn’t feel guilty. You shouldn’t beat yourself up for not having a relationship with your parents.

  There’s a reason Jesus gave us permission to dust off our sandals and walk away. There are situations like this across America. Fathers have been so bad, mothers have been so bad, they forfeit any right to be part of their children’s lives. I know that’s harsh, but that’s reality. Yes, I believe Christ can chang
e people’s lives, but each person has to give Christ permission to work. Without this permission, Christ won’t do any mighty works. Just as He left His hometown without doing anything because of their unbelief, Jesus will walk away from anyone who won’t open the door for Him.

  I know these situations are rare, but they are the only reality some of our friends know. That’s why intergenerational groups are so important in church life. This is the place where the Father recreates the family unit. Those without a father, find a father. Those without a mother, find a mother, and those without children find scores of them—and grandchildren too!

  Relationships with our parents are foundational relationships of human life. We are formed and shaped by our mothers and fathers, for better or for worse. This is why this relationship is addressed right in the middle of the Ten Commandments. As the Israelites moved into the Promised Land, God gave His people ten laws that would define their relationships with Him and each other. The fifth commandment says, “Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exod. 20:12).

  As others have noticed, this is the first commandment with a promise attached, but notice something else. The commandment is directed to the children, not the parents. I would have thought the commandment would be directed to the parents, something like, “Raise up good kid,” or, “Take your children to church.”

  It’s not. It’s directed to the children who are commanded to “honor” their parents. The parents don’t even have to be worth honoring—there’s no descriptive clause here—for the children to be required to honor them. This verse is never qualified or watered down. It says what it means, and it means what it says.