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This is one of the few photos I have of my sweet mom,
Mary (Nisly) Yoder 1904-1971 |
This is a message I gave at a service at Strite Auditorium at Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community in 2019:
On this Mother's Day I'm reflecting on some of the ways mothers, and the loss of mothers, affect us, and how they have impacted my own family of origin. I'm sure many of you would have similar loss and blessing stories of your own.
My mother was born in rural Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1904, the ninth child of devoted Christian parents Eli and Fannie (Troyer) Nisly. Her father, my grandfather Eli Nisly, was a beloved bishop of their church. Her mother Fannie had lost her mother at a very young age, and as a 19 year old moved to Kansas to help with housekeeping for her future husband Eli's father Abraham and children, whose wife, my grandfather Eli's mother, had died young. So this is how these two motherless young people met and eventually married and had 13 children of their own.
My parents married when mom was 21 and my dad 20. After working on my grandfather's Dan Yoder's farm near Thomas, Oklahoma, they travelled some 200 miles by team and wagon from Oklahoma to Kansas in the middle of winter, where they started their family.
With only a sixth grade education, my Mom loved life, loved learning, and always encouraged us to do our best at school. And in the spirit of Proverbs 31, she, with her family's help, put out two gardens every year, canned and froze tons of food for her family, raised canaries to sell, grew lots of flowers, constantly entertained guests from the church and visitors from out of town, and took care of numerous foster children who were motherless, besides raising her own family of 8 children. My parents then adopted my next younger sister, number 9, who came to our home at four weeks as their first foster child, Mary Beth, who had had only a grandmother looking after her, and who was essentially motherless when she came to us.
In spite of the fact that we were always poor, my mom always found enough to share with others, and was willing to take time to help mother and care for others in our congregation and community when there was a special need, an illness, or a new baby in the family. For ten years, in her later life, she learned to use a typewriter and was the children's editor for the English section of the Herald der Wahrheit (Herald of Truth) where she was known as Aunt Mary to young readers of subscribing families.
In spite of all of the stresses in her life, I don't remember mom ever raising her voice in anger, or slapping or spanking us in anger, even though I know we seriously tried her patience time and time again. I attribute all that to her good upbringing and to her faith, though she wasn't one to do a lot of talking about her relationship with God. And while I know she knelt by her bed to pray every day, I never heard her pray out loud. That was Dad's role, who gathered the family together to read the Bible and kneel with us to pray every morning before going out to do the day's work on the farm or before our going to school.
Then 52 years ago this spring, my mom was diagnosed with bone cancer and died in December of '71 at 67 years of age. I was 32, and our whole family experienced this as a terrible shock. Especially my father, Ben, who felt lost without her, and who not long after her death, married one of my mom's sisters who had become a widow.
My dad had lost his own mother when he was only three, and she was the third of his grieving father Dan's wives to pass away. The third. The first, Lucy Lehman, died of measles when she was only 23, leaving Dan with two young children, and then their youngest, Mary died on the day of Lucy's funeral, also of measles. Dan's second wife Rebecca died of tuberculosis at 29, leaving five more motherless children, and the youngest of these then also died of tuberculosis within six month's of Rebecca's passing. Then my grandmother, Elizabeth, Dan's third wife, died at age 35 in giving birth to a stillborn child. leaving my father and an older sister and brother and all their half siblings motherless. He told me once he often cried himself to sleep, wishing he had a mother in his life to comfort and care for him, rather than just a grieving father he called “a man of sorrows.”
And then my grandfather Dan Yoder, eight years after my grandmother Elizabeth’s death, married a younger widowed mother of six children and seven motherless stepchildren, some of the older of whom had already married and left home. So my father grew up in a highly stressed and grieving blended family that never blended well, his father Dan and the new mother Miriam Mullet representing two very different family cultures, the Yoder side being super strict and somber, and the Mullet side being more spontaneous and fun loving.
Looking back I see my family of origin being strongly affected by the premature loss of mothers, my grandfather Eli's, my grandmother Fannie, father Ben's and his siblings' and half siblings' mothers, my younger adopted sister, and then we lost our own mother, at a somewhat later age, 67. It helps me understand an underlying theme of sadness and the need for approval and love and blessing we experience a lot of. Every marriage, someone has said, is in part an attempt to heal childhood wounds. As men, we fall in love with a beloved other we see as the consummate nurturer, someone who will care for us and stand by us and meet our deepest needs for love and care and belonging, as well as to provide that for our children. I know that, subconsciously or otherwise, affected my choice of the warm, deeply caring and nurturing wife and mother of our children, Alma Jean. She’s been a tremendous blessing!
God designed all of us in the human family to be dependent on mothers and mother figures not only to love and nurture us when we’re young, and to help us throughout life become better able to pass on love to others.
One of my older sisters, Fannie Mae, named after our mother's mother, never married but became an RN and served as a midwife who delivered over 200 babies in a clinic in Belize and then in Paraguay, and later adopted an autistic and abandoned child that a Paraguayan orphanage begged her to find a home for in the states, and my sister ended up becoming her loving single mother to Nina, needy and motherless. She is one of my heroes as a mom and a professional nurse, who now at 87, is a resident at Blue Ridge Christian Homes near Raphine.
And now she is being cared for by some of the most selfless, motherly nurses and nursing assistants you could find anywhere. All of us are blessed to have selfless people like that in our lives, who share the mothering qualities of our Abba, our loving parent God, with a big lap and a warm embrace.
I don't find it surprising that at FLRC, where I work half time, we have more people who call in wanting a female counselor than males. That's partly because we have more women clients than men, but I suspect there's also a sense that women are more nurturing in ways all of us, young and old, need and long for.
I'm teaching a parenting class of seven young women right now who are a part of a court ordered Day Reporting program. Five are mothers, with from one to five young children each, one is expecting any day, and another hopes to become a mother as soon as her current boy friend proves to be a stable part of her life. I'm moved by their stories, many have experienced little in the way of good mothering or stable parenting in their own lives, most are from broken homes, and all are a part of broken homes themselves, some were raised by grandparents, some grew up in and out of foster homes and juvenile detention facilities. All are trying to get custody of their own children and to establish a better home for them than they experienced themselves.
And I think, what a challenge. In the first session, we listed some of the good qualities they wanted their children to graduate from their homes with, wonderful qualities like kindness, respect, caring, honesty, creativity, empathy, confidence, hard work, etc. And of course, they all realized that the best way to instill these values is not by trying to beat them into their children, or to lecture into them, but by consistently demonstrating those qualities in the context of loving relationships with their children as their mother.
I’m more than glad to volunteer time for opportunities like that to pass on some of the good influences I've been blessed with in my life, through my mother as well as my dad, and other good mother and father figures in my life, and in the caring congregation I grew up in.
No wonder the writer of Proverbs calls people like that priceless, worth far more than rubies or diamonds.
May all of their children, all of us, rise up and call them blessed.
