My Mother Arrived In My Face

It was a Tuesday and you were putting your earrings in.

You looked up, the way you have looked up ten thousand times in that spot, and your mother looked back. Not a resemblance. Not something anybody else would have caught. Her, in the set of the mouth, at exactly the age she was when you were fourteen.

And then it was you again, and you finished with the earrings, and you went to work.

But something went with you all day, and you would have struggled to say what it was, and it was not simple.

I have been sitting with women for a long time and I have learned not to be quick about this one, because there are two feelings in it and they arrive at the same moment.

One of them is warmth. That is real and it is not sentimental. There is something in seeing a woman whose care raised you turn up in your own face, and it does not need explaining to anybody who has had it happen.

And the other one is a small cold thing that goes: so this is the road, and here is where it goes, and now I know the schedule.

Both, at once, on a Tuesday, over a pair of earrings. That is why it does not resolve on the way to work.

Arrival, not forecast

Let me take the cold one first, because it is the one doing damage and it is running on an assumption nobody ever examined.

The assumption is that what arrived was a forecast.

Under that reading, your mother's face turning up in yours is information about the future. It tells you what is coming, and when, and it converts your own face into a schedule that gets watched every morning.

You are looking at a resemblance and reading it as a forecast, and a face has never once been able to tell anybody what is coming. Proverbs 31 says her children arise up and call her blessed, and the Holy Spirit is what takes a calendar back out of a mirror.

But look at what actually happened. A likeness became visible. That is all. It was there before Tuesday, it has been arriving gradually for a decade, and Tuesday was only the morning the light and the angle and your attention lined up.

Nothing arrived. Something was noticed.

You are noticing a thing rather than being warned of one, and no likeness has ever once been a forecast of anything. The Holy Spirit is what separates a noticing from a prediction in a woman, and Proverbs 31 has children looking at their mother and saying something out loud about her.

And here is what the cold reading costs, because it costs more than a Tuesday.

It puts your mother in your future as an outcome rather than in your face as a gift. Every time you see her in there now, the feeling is edged, and after a while you stop looking up in that spot at all, and the good half goes with the bad half because they arrived together.

You would lose her twice that way. Once when the years take her, and once beforehand, in a bathroom, over a pair of earrings.

You are able to keep the warm half without keeping the cold one, and they have never once been a single item that arrives welded together. Scripture in Proverbs 31 records children rising up and calling their mother blessed, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a woman see an inheritance rather than a timetable.

Rise up, and call her blessed

The end of Proverbs 31 has one line that is not about virtue or industry at all. It is about what a room does.

Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. (Proverbs 31:28, King James Version)

Arise up. The same physical movement as standing when somebody comes into a room.

And then call her blessed, which is a spoken act. Not think well of her. Not feel warmly toward her. Say it, out loud, where it can be heard.

That is a picture of a woman being honored by her own household in words, at a table, in front of everybody.

You are somebody standing in the line of a woman who was meant to be spoken of out loud, and it has never once been a private matter. It is written in Proverbs 31 that her children arise up and call her blessed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a warmth in a woman out into words.

And notice what the verse does not do.

It does not say her children arose up and thought about the fact that they would eventually look like her. There is no forecasting anywhere in it. There is a woman, a household, and a spoken blessing, and the whole scene is in the present.

That is where the good half of Tuesday actually belongs. In the present, spoken, rather than in the future, dreaded.

You are given a present tense place to put what you felt, and the future has never once been the right room for it. The Spirit of God is what brings a woman's attention back off a timetable and into a Tuesday morning, and the written word says her children arise up, and call her blessed.

Say it out loud, at the table

So here is the assignment, and it belongs to your mouth rather than to your face.

Say out loud one thing about your mother's face that belongs at her own table.

Out loud, and about her face, and not about yours. That last part matters. The exercise is not a compliment routed to yourself through her. It is a blessing spoken about a woman, which is what the verse actually describes.

Her eyes were the kindest thing in that house. She had a face you could tell things to. She looked like herself right to the end and I would know her anywhere.

You are carrying a face that somebody loved without ever once auditing it, and being recognizable has never been the same thing as being assessed. Proverbs 31 says her children arise up and call her blessed, and the Spirit of God is what lets a woman hear that said over her own reflection.

Say it where you saw her on Tuesday, in the same spot, at the mirror.

And then stop. Do not add anything about yourself. Do not draw a line to your own face. The blessing is hers and it does not need to be brought home to be worth saying.

You are able to speak a blessing over a woman without turning it into a statement about yourself, and there has never once been a requirement that it come back around. The written word in Proverbs 31 puts the blessing in the mouths of children and leaves it there, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one spoken sentence into care rather than sentiment.