My Mother’s First Gray Hair

I remember my mother’s first gray hair. She was sitting one row in front of me and Barry Kingsley at the Duluth Church of Christ on a Sunday morning sometime around 1970. I don’t recall where Barry’s mother was sitting, but my guess is she was one row behind us because neither of our mothers ever got on board with that whole Your-Child-Just-Needs-A-Lot-Of-Positive-Reinforcement mumbo jumbo that was just beginning to catch on with the culture. They were into old school discipline even when that school of child-rearing wasn’t all that old. Plus, me and Barry were a handful.

Anyway, sometime in a quiet moment in the service, maybe during the Lord’s Supper, I noticed a single tress of soft gray hair nestled in my mother’s otherwise brunette mane. Just one six-inch long frosted thread shining in the fluorescent light of Sunday church.

Have you ever had an existential moment? A moment where the very foundations of life, your life, are dramatically called into question? An event or a realization that shakes you to your core and forces you to confront realities to which you were previously oblivious? That lone gray hair, that intrusive ashen filament was my existential moment.

A cold chill ran through me. My pulse quickened. The sound of my own heartbeat drummed in my ears. I leaned back into the hard pew and whispered to myself, “My mother is getting . . . old.” If I’m right – that this occurred around 1970 – I would have been eleven. Mom would have been 36.

Okay. So I was a little dramatic as a kid. That’s probably one of the reasons my mother started graying in her thirties. That, and the other four handfuls to whom she gave birth. And there’s the irony. Our mothers give us life and we age our mothers. We contribute absolutely nothing to the process. We are freely given the unmerited gift of family. It is the biological equivalent of God’s grace. And, like God’s grace, life itself comes at a price.

It matters not a bit whether we enter into our mother’s lives through the convulsive contractions of birth or through the complexities of legal adoption. Either way, our mothers give up a little of their youth every single day just so they can watch us grow older.

Now, my mother’s hair is all gray. It is soft and fine and it is her crown and her glory. She earned every single silver strand. When one of us fractured a bone or underwent a surgery, a little time worried off our mother’s biological clock. When one of us suffered a broken heart, her heart gave up a few beats. When we crept in, ninja-like, after a missed curfew, she had already been pacing the floor. And when each of us left home to follow whatever call we had heard, she let us go. But we took a little of her with us.

Here’s another irony. There comes a time when the roles reverse. The children, now grown, begin to return the life they were given, just so they can watch their mothers grow another day older. This is what God had in mind, I think, when he told Moses to tell Israel to honor your mother.