Doing My Mother's Hair

Her mother is eighty-one and cannot manage it herself anymore, so this is a Thursday thing now, at the kitchen sink, with a towel and the good conditioner and the water run warm.

It is one of the better hours of her week and she would not give it up. Her mother talks the whole time. About the neighbors, about a program she watched, about somebody's grandson who has done well. It is easy and it is warm and there is nobody else on earth she is this uncomplicated with.

And then her mother says the sentence.

She says it the way she has said it since before this daughter was born, lightly, as a joke, as a self-deprecating aside on the way to something else. It is a short sentence about her own face and it is the same six or seven words in the same order and she has been saying them for at least forty years.

And standing behind her with a comb in her hand and her mother's wet hair between her fingers, the daughter hears it and something goes very still in the room, because that sentence is in her own head. Not similar to it. It. The same words. She has been saying it to herself in mirrors since she was a teenager and she has always experienced it as her own private honest assessment, and it is not hers. It never was. It came out of this woman's mouth at some point when she was small and it went in whole and she has been carrying it as her own thought for thirty years.

She keeps combing. She does not say anything, because what would you say.

And then the second thing arrives, which is worse. Her own daughter is at the table doing homework. And she thinks: how many times has she heard me say it.

And you know that sink. Somebody handed you a valuation before you were old enough to decline it, and if it came through a family it did not arrive as an opinion at all, it arrived as the weather. Nobody in a house presents the house's verdicts as verdicts. They are just how things are talked about.

Take this in before we go one line further, because I think you have already braced to be told to blame somebody. You are not carrying this because anybody set out to give it to you, and your mother is not the villain here. Psalm 139:13 says He possessed your inward parts and covered you in your mother's womb, and He was there for the making of both of you, and the Holy Spirit is standing in this kitchen and is not embarrassed to be here.

Four words, and all of them given

There is a sentence in Peter's letter that stacks four titles on top of each other, and the thing to notice is not how grand they are. It is that not one of them can be self-awarded.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.1 Peter 2:9

Chosen. Somebody else chooses. Royal. Somebody else confers it. Holy, which means set apart, and setting apart is done by the one doing the separating. Peculiar, which in the old sense means belonging particularly to somebody, a personal possession.

Every one of the four is a status handed down from outside the person. And that is exactly what a family verdict is. Nobody in that kitchen decided what they were worth. It was handed down, from a woman, from her mother before her, in six or seven words on the way to something else.

So this is not a contest between what somebody told you and what you decide to believe about yourself. That contest is not winnable and you have been losing it for thirty years. It is a contest between two conferrals, and the only question that matters is which one was made by somebody with the standing to make it.

You are chosen, royal, set apart and personally His, and every one of those was conferred by the only voice with the authority to confer anything. The written word stacks four titles that a person cannot award themselves, which is precisely what makes them able to outrank the ones a family awards; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that higher conferral into a kitchen on a Thursday afternoon.

And notice the direction it moves. Called out of darkness into His marvelous light. Called out of. Not: improved where you stood.

Why an inherited verdict never gets examined

I want to be honest about why this has run for thirty years, because if I pretend a woman should have caught it earlier you will read your own difficulty as failure, and it is not.

You cannot examine the water you swim in. A verdict handed down inside a family is not delivered as a claim; it is delivered as ordinary conversation, in a kitchen, by somebody who loves you, about herself. Nobody said it about you. That is what makes it so hard to see. It was never aimed at you at all, and so there was never a moment where you had the chance to accept or refuse it. You simply learned how a woman talks about her own face, from the woman you learned everything else from.

You were not weak to take it in, and it came to you as weather and not as an argument. Isaiah 44:2 says the Lord that made thee and formed thee from the womb will help thee, and the helping is His work rather than a reward for insight; His Spirit does that helping on His own schedule and asks nothing of you first.

And there is a second half, and it is tender. That sentence is your mother's, and she got it from somewhere too. She was a girl in somebody's kitchen once, hearing a woman she loved say something about herself in six or seven words on the way to something else. Which means this is not a fault that begins with her, and being angry at an eighty-one-year-old woman with wet hair is both unavailable and not the point.

You are not being asked to confront anybody, and there is no conversation you have to go and have. Psalm 103:13 says as a father pities his children so the Lord pities them that fear Him, and pity there is the strong old word for tenderness from somebody who understands the whole situation; the same Spirit carrying that tenderness is the one who stopped you with a comb in your hand.

And if what came up at that sink is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it alone. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you can say one true sentence in front of.

The girl at the table

Here is where this becomes urgent, and it is not about your mother and it is not really about you.

There is a child at that table doing her homework, and she is currently learning how a woman talks about her own face, and she is learning it the way you learned it, which is to say she is not being taught, she is absorbing the weather.

And you are the weather.

That is not guilt. That is the most hopeful sentence in this article, because it means the line does not have to be broken by confronting an eighty-one-year-old woman or by resolving thirty years of your own history. It has to be broken by one woman saying something different out loud in a kitchen, on purpose, where a nine-year-old can hear it.

You are able to be the place this stops, and you are already standing in the room where it happens. Scripture says He called you out of darkness into His marvelous light, and out of is a word about leaving a location rather than improving one; the Holy Spirit is the one who is ending a sentence that has been running through a family for three generations.

So the sink is not where the verdict is kept. It is where a woman stood with a comb in her hand and heard a sentence for the first time as a sentence, and where the whole thing came apart in her fingers. And your mother is eighty-one, and she loves you, and she has no idea, and she never did.