While My Broke Heart Gently Weeps
One more time, and for the very last time, my mother rejected me.
“Is Cora Wendel your mother?”
Instantly, a familiar melancholy engulfed me. My spirit became heavy. My stomach churned. I thought seriously about not replying. Big sigh …
“Yes,” I cautiously typed. “Why do you ask?”
The person on the other end of Facebook Messenger identified herself and explained that she was a home healthcare nurse providing hospice services to my mother.
“Your mom is dying.”
Crap! I knew I shouldn’t have responded, but it was too late. Now, I was forced to do something with that information. I would much rather have heard she was dead than to know she was dying. At the risk of sounding callous, I would have to pretend to care—I would have to do something—and that’s hard work. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s where I was at the time.
When I read that Facebook message in May of 2010, I was living in Goshen, Indiana, among the peace-loving Anabaptists, with my wife, Karen, and the two of our four children who were still living at home. I had neither seen nor heard from my mother in nearly a decade, and that was perfectly fine with me. I didn’t miss her. Rarely did I think of her, and when I did, it wasn’t fondly. I was finally at a place in my life where I felt healed and at peace with my chaotic, abusive past. It had taken years and lots of inner turmoil to get there. That unexpected message revealed that I wasn’t healed, at least not fully. Apparently, there was some deeper work God needed to do in and through me.
In her lifetime, my mother carried the legal names of Cora Wood (her maiden name), Cora Brown, Cora Bray, Cora Day, and for the last twelve years or so, Cora Wendel. She’d had that one the longest, but I barely knew her by that name.
When she met Richard Wendel, she was homeless, living in a car that no longer started. He was chronically ill. They took care of each other. I suppose it was a relationship of mutual utility. The two of them did, however, manage to buy an old house on a small tract of land near the head of a mountain hollow. It had a garden, with flowers and finches, and lots of bats in the attic. I suppose, in a sad kind of way, she was happiest during those years with Richard. She was finally with a man who stayed, and who didn’t abuse, cheat, or take advantage of her. I guess that’s all my mother ever wanted. That isn’t asking for much, yet for some reason it eluded her for most of her life.
I’m convinced the most important decision any of us can make in our lifetime is who we will marry. Think about it. Choosing the wrong spouse can have all kinds of negative consequences, some lasting a lifetime. A bad marriage can lead to an onslaught of pain and loss, including, but not limited to, child abuse and neglect, financial instability, emotional and physical trauma, spiritual deformity, broken relationships, misguided careers, lost passions, and even stolen identities—depriving you of who you were intended to be and could have been. All of those horrible things, and more, happened to my mother as a result of her bad choices in men. As the country music song of her time went, she “was looking for love in all the wrong places. Looking for love in too many faces.”
Before you think I’m being judgmental, let me give you some perspective that I have now, which I didn’t have then. People who aren’t whole, who are hurting emotionally, often seek romantic relationships to fill a big void in their heart. They have a deep need to be loved, and feel loved. Of course, this is never the answer, especially for the other person being used as a type of psychotropic medication. The reason is rather obvious: Hurting people tend to hurt other people, especially the ones closest to them. Relationships built on this faulty foundation usually end badly. When they do, it only adds to their pain and desperation. The rebound relationship can be twice as bad. My mother went through this cycle numerous times over her sixty-five years.
A woman with no high school education, few skills, and a big open wound in her heart may have many paramours just to survive physically and emotionally. My mother had more men in her life than I can count or care to remember. As you can probably imagine, they weren’t the best of men, although they included a prominent business leader, a state senator, and a few other “good catches.”
As an adult, I’ve met some of these men, while doing business or at a community function. None of them remembered me, or at least suggested in any way that they did. I never bring it up, but I remember them. I especially recall the promises some of them made to me as a child—promises they never kept and probably never had any intention of keeping. They were the sort of pledges men “on the prowl for some nookie” make to the children of the women they’re pursuing—empty words designed to make everyone feel wanted. These are the worst kind of lies men use to manipulate single mothers.
There were times when we were out of food, or the rent was past due, that my mother would give me a dime and a telephone number. Because the phone was usually disconnected, I would have to find a payphone to call the number she had written on my hand or forearm. When the person answered, I simply said, “Cora needs money.” Some man would eventually show up and spend the night. The next morning, there would be cash on the table. Crisis averted.
If my mother was with a guy for any stretch of time, she would unofficially take on his last name. She always wanted me to do it too. That is, if I was part of the picture. Much of the time, I wasn’t. I can remember getting into an argument with one of my teachers who said the name I was signing on my papers wasn’t my legal name. He insisted I stop using it; I insisted otherwise. I had to choose whether to do as my teacher said or what my mother wanted. In the end, it didn’t really matter, because I wasn’t likely to be in that school long, and the man with the different last name wasn’t likely to be around much longer. In that instance, I continued to sign my name “Bobby Hill,” and as predicted, I changed schools and last names when my mother changed who she was sleeping with.
When my mother was married or living with someone, I wasn’t usually around. Sometimes I was close by, sometimes not. Sometimes, I was with relatives, sometimes not. Sometimes, it was a good situation, sometimes not. Actually, a lot of times not.
That’s how she liked it, though: close enough that if she wanted or needed me she could get her hands on me, but far enough away not to get in the way of her love interests or lifestyle. She told me more than once, in no uncertain terms, that if it came down to it she would pick her new husband or boyfriend over me. I knew from experience that she meant it.
As a result of my mother’s wandering ways and unstable relationships, I lived in over thirty different places before graduating from high school. Very few I would call home, and I can’t remember any of them being for longer than two years.
That day on Facebook Messenger, after all of this history had rushed through my mind like a brushfire, I told my mom’s healthcare worker, “Next time my mother is conscious, ask her if her firstborn can come see her.”
Asking if her “firstborn” could visit would be a gentle reminder to my mother that she had other children, and that they might also want to know she was dying. My mother had four other children from her first marriage, all sons. None of them had been part of her life since they were very young. Forty-nine years old, married with four children of my own, I couldn’t believe I so easily reverted back to “gentle reminders.” As a child, I’d been conditioned to avoid telling my mother what I really wanted if there was any chance she wouldn’t like it. If I guessed wrong, there was usually hell to pay. If I’m being honest, part of this was born of the passive-aggressive nature of my Appalachian culture. It’s woven into the fabric of how we do relationships. Part of it was due to my conflict-avoidant type of personality. I will go miles out of my way to keep from upsetting someone, which I now understand may actually be a learned trauma response. Mostly, though, I was couching the question in such a way as to soften the blow of an answer I was pretty sure would not be in my favor.
A few days later, the healthcare worker messaged again. “Your mother was conscious today,” she wrote. “We had a good talk. I told her that I have been in contact with you. I asked if you could visit her. She said, ‘No.’ She doesn’t want you here. Barney said he would kill you if you showed up down here.”
After Richard Wendel passed away, my mother shacked up one last time with an old mountain man I’ll call “Barney.” I didn’t know him and I wasn’t surprised. She couldn’t be without a man for very long.
It wasn’t Barney’s threat that bothered me. I couldn’t have cared less about him or the stuff of hers he thought I might want after her death. I was certain she didn’t have anything I desired, except maybe a handful of tattered photos she kept in an old shoebox, and retrieving those wouldn’t be worth the drama. It was my mother’s answer that stung. One more time, and for the very last time, my mother rejected me. It hurt. Again. You wouldn’t think it would. You would think a man with five decades under his belt would be mature enough not to be bothered by that. You would think I’d have outgrown the need to be accepted by her. But, you would be wrong. There’s something deep in the soul of every child, no matter their age, that longs for the love and affection of their mother.
Those who have been abandoned or rejected by a family member—by their mother in particular—feel the added heartache of being robbed of something that is innately sacrosanct. It’s a silent, simmering kind of pain that leaves the person in an altered state. If not dealt with properly, this pain can be destructive, not only to the one who has been rejected, but also to those they try to love. Without professional help and divine healing, this person will likely spend their entire life trying to overcome that heartache or looking for something to numb the pain.
Today, I can honestly say that I hold no ill will in my heart against my mother. There’s no more hidden anger or deep-rooted bitterness. On the other hand, there isn’t any great love either. On the subject of my mother, I feel neutral. Trust me, it’s perfectly OK and even healthy to feel neutral in such cases. It’s far better than being overcome with bitterness. Don’t let anyone, especially yourself, guilt trip you for feeling nothing. I’m hoping though, in time, that I will feel more. It certainly helps that I can now see her through the lens of her own childhood trauma.
As an adult with children of my own, and working in a helping profession, I’ve come to understand that my mother’s many deficits were rooted in a severely dysfunctional family, living in a culture of deep and pervasive poverty. When I reflect on the many bad life choices she made, I try to keep that in perspective. It helps me to remember that she also grew up without a father and with a mother who was far more cold and detached than she would later be. But that doesn’t absolve her of her sinful choices or of the pain she caused. No matter what happens to us, we remain free agents.
Playing the victim card should never be used as an excuse to harm someone else. Her past, however, does put her deeds into context. The abuse and neglect she experienced from those who were supposed to—expected to—love and care for her made her a victim and helped create a villain. While I have little room in my heart for my mother, the villain, there is growing space for Cora, the poor, young, vulnerable, female victim. Perhaps, if she had received the kind of help that’s available today, things could have been different for both of us.
Another message came about a week later: “Your mother passed away today. I’ll let you know about the arrangements.”
I thanked the nurse for letting me know and told her I had no interest in attending the funeral. That’s not to say I didn’t mourn. I did and still do. I will probably always mourn the loss of the kind of mother I never had. And while I didn’t shed a tear for my mother after learning of her death, I have recently gained the ability to weep for Cora.
Some of you can relate. The pervasive sadness of never having been truly loved by a parent can bestow a tenacious sense of loneliness. Even in a crowd of people I know, dear friends and family I cherish, a shadow of insecurity often lingers just beneath the surface, as if taunting me: “You have nothing to be happy about. No one loves you; they’re all going to leave you.”
Looking back, I wonder how often my mother felt that too. I wonder how many times that drove her into the arms of a man who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give her what she really wanted: true, unconditional love.
Maybe you think I’m cold-hearted. The hospice nurse certainly did. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t drop everything, despite Barney’s threats, and rush to Tennessee to be by my mother’s side. But I know some of you reading this will understand. For folks like us, Mother’s Day is the toughest holiday of the year. We can honor motherhood as a beautiful concept and highest ideal, but we cannot sincerely celebrate (or mourn) our own mothers.
A mother’s love is considered a universal constant. It’s settled science, so to speak. Sure, it’s accepted that a father may be absent or present and cold. Friends aren’t always reliable, even the best of friends. And love between a husband and wife might fade with time or circumstances. But a mother’s love is thought to be unconditional and without end. The ideal of motherhood is simply unquestioned by most people. A mother’s love is lifted up as the highest of earthly virtues. In most cases I suppose that’s true, but for millions of us that isn’t the reality. We would trade every holiday on the calendar for a mother we could honor and celebrate, and yes, even mourn.
In the end, I did go to the funeral. I learned that Joe, the oldest of my four brothers, was going, and I wanted to see him. He needed closure, and I suppose I did too. We met each other in Tennessee. He came from Iowa and I from Indiana. We hugged and then sat together in silence a few feet away from the lifeless body of the woman who birthed us.
My mother had always been an attractive woman. In her younger days, she was given the nickname “Sam,” because she reminded a lot of people of Samantha, the main character on the television show Bewitched. That said, attracting suitors was no problem for my mother. But the woman lying before me and my brother, in what was supposed to be eternal rest, didn’t look anything like her. She had always lived hard, but her final years had obviously been very difficult. I looked closely for something that assured me this was indeed my mother. I couldn’t find it. The lady in the casket was a stranger to me.
I hadn’t been to many funerals as a child. That would have required knowing and caring about family members. That was not my extended family. If anyone in my extended family did go to a funeral, they would just hang out in the parking lot to see who else came. They usually didn’t go inside.
As a minister, though, I had officiated some funerals, and my mother’s was the most pitiful I had ever seen. I think there’s something to the idea that you can tell a lot about a person by how they’re laid to rest. The funeral home was nearly empty. No one rose to give testimony about the impact she had on their life. None of her eight remaining siblings were there. The pallbearers were hired and, by their appearance, right off the street. Although we barely talked, I was pleased to see my mother’s third husband there. Barney, the old mountain man, was the only one who seemed to be grieving. Unshaven, dressed in well-worn bib overalls and a wrinkled white shirt, he sobbed throughout the service. When it was over, I walked up and embraced the man who had recently threatened to kill me and told him I was sorry for his loss.
It took me fifteen years, I’m ashamed to admit, to appreciate that there was at least one person who cried for my mother on the day of her funeral. Her life meant so much to Barney that he was willing to kill for her. I’m thankful she had that kind of devotion at the end of her life.
After the service, my brother Joe and I went to the place where we had briefly lived together with our three siblings before we were permanently separated. I was 9 at the time. He was only 7. Although the structure no longer stood, Joe recognized the spot immediately. It had been forty years since we lived at that address, but the memories were palpable for both of us. Neither of us were emotional at the funeral, but there, standing together on an empty concrete pad at a nondescript spot on the side of the road, the tears flowed freely.
My brother and I shared a strange bond. It was the sort of connection that people who suffer together form. Even though we hadn’t seen or talked to each other in years, on that day and in that empty space, we were chained together to the same foul memories. It felt like we were children again, but not in a good way. We felt exposed and vulnerable, just as we did four decades earlier.
In the fall of 1971, Everett Brown, my mother’s first husband and Joe’s father, showed up unexpectedly and abducted his four boys, but left me standing confused, afraid, and alone on the side of the road.
A couple of months before, my 26-year-old mother had filed for divorce. She packed up my four brothers, came and got me from where I was living, and moved us back to her ancestral home, Jellico, a small Tennessee coal town on the Kentucky border. As many times as we moved, we always managed to bounce back to Jellico. I would eventually graduate from the high school there, and despite living in so many different places, have always considered it my hometown.
The town’s unofficial motto, “No matter where you go, you’ll find someone from Jellico,” says everything you need to know. In its heyday, when coal was king, it was a thriving community, with an opera house that produced Grace Moore, a singer and actress nicknamed the “Tennessee Nightingale.” At one time, Jellico had a larger population than Knoxville. Johnny Cash even mentions it in his song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” However, by the 1970s, when we moved to Jellico, it had been struggling for some time.
The father of my four brothers—Joe, David, Randy, and Leslie—had found out where we had been living all that summer. It was a small, concrete block, two-bedroom apartment that sat over an auto repair shop on the town’s main road. The unhappy abode was provided to my mother, courtesy of the greasy shop owner. Many afternoons, he would walk into the apartment without knocking. We would be told to go to our room and given the same clear instructions from our mother: “Don’t y’all dare make any noise.” We would stay there for hours, sometimes until the next morning. With no toys and nothing to do, we fought like wild dogs. Joe and I would go after each other with every intent to do bodily harm. We punched, scratched, kicked, gouged, and bit the insufferably hot hours away. Sometimes, our mother would burst into the room, screaming and whipping us with a switch or a belt. It didn’t matter if you were guilty of a noise crime or not, everyone got a few lashes on the bare legs and back for good measure.
At night, though, we boys put our strife aside. Because the two single mattresses on the floor had no coverings, and because we were usually dressed in only our underwear, we would huddle together on just one of those mattresses to keep warm. That tiny room smelled of sweat, urine, and messy diapers.
When we weren’t locked in our bedroom that summer, we would play in the parking lot among the broken-down cars. We would wave and sometimes throw rocks at the cars passing by on 25W. I imagine that’s how we got the attention of social services. Someone either reported the sights and sounds coming from that apartment, or the troublesome behavior of filthy, unsupervised children playing near a busy highway. However it happened, social services notified Everett Brown in Iowa that they were going to place us in foster care if things didn’t get better—and quickly.
Everett and his brother Fred arrived in town not long after school had started for the fall. They staked out the apartment the day before and spent the night nearby in Everett’s car. They made their daring move the next morning, while Joe and I were waiting for the school bus in front of Ray Maiden’s store, on the Kentucky side of Jellico. We were about a hundred yards or so up the street from the prison cell we called home when, to our great surprise, Everett and Fred pulled up beside us and told Joe to hurry up and get in the car. I still remember the big, glowing smile on Joe’s face, as he happily obeyed his father. I started to get in, too, but the man who I thought at the time was my father said he couldn’t take me.
Somewhat puzzled, I thought maybe Everett meant there was no room in the car. So, as he pulled away, I started walking back to the apartment. I was so excited to see him and thought it was going to be a special kind of day. Before I reached the apartment, I saw my barely clothed mother shouting and swearing and chasing after Everett, who had the three boys, the youngest just an infant in his arms. Once in the car, they all sped off, with my mother chasing them down the road like a crazy woman. When she realized it was futile, she stopped yelling but kept running all the way to her mother’s house, about a half a mile down the state highway.
Confused and shocked by what had happened, I stood there on the highway for a while, waiting for someone to tell me what to do. When no one did, I took off running to my grandmother’s house as fast as my 9-year-old legs could run. Embarrassed by the spectacle, however, I slowed down to a purposeful-looking walk as my school bus passed, the curious faces of my peers pressed hard against the windows. I never returned to that school and remember being thankful that I didn’t have to explain it all to them.
Once in Iowa, it was discovered that my baby brother, Leslie, was gravely ill and could have died if he remained in that hot apartment much longer. Years later, Everett told me that leaving me there on the side of the road was the hardest thing he ever had to do. He explained that since he wasn’t my birth father, taking me would have been considered kidnapping and he couldn’t risk losing the other boys. I wouldn’t see my brothers again until 1998, twenty-seven years later. Despite the good intentions of child protective services, things went from bad to worse for me. As I learned years later, it didn’t go so well for my brothers either.
Even though it was painful and somewhat awkward, I’m so glad I joined my long-lost brother at our mother’s funeral. Weary of life’s struggles and hardships, he committed suicide about a year later. Childhood trauma had claimed another victim. Here’s a concept I want you to understand early on in this book: The body, mind, and soul never forget what is done to them, and the repayment rate is very high. At some point, they will start the foreclosure process if their demands are not met.
My other three brothers gave me the unpleasant honor of officiating Joe’s funeral in Iowa. In stark contrast to my mother’s funeral, the life of this AWOL Marine—an ex-felon with a big heart—was celebrated by a packed house of friends and family. It was the rowdiest funeral I have ever witnessed. Joe had obviously left his mark on the people who knew and loved him.
Even though I barely knew Joe as an adult, I had no trouble crying that day for the little boy I remembered. Not so much because he was dead, or the young age of his death, or even the violent way he took his own life, but because he died never having known what I believe he longed for so desperately—the unconditional love and unquestionable acceptance of his own mother. I can’t think of anything more unnaturally tragic. Can you?
———
The following is dedicated to Cora, the girl who became my mother. She knew many men, but rarely found love. The lyrics are inspired by The Beatles’ song, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Only 7 years old at the time of its release, the message and melody only really spoke to me much later in life. Once I understood what the song was about, I knew I needed to write my own orphan version of it.
While My Broke Heart Gently Weeps
I look at you Mom,
See the pain there that’s sleeping,
While my broke heart gently weeps.
I look at the door,
And I see men are waiting.
Still my broke heart gently weeps.
I wish I knew why nobody showed you,
How to unfold your love.
I don’t know why so many abused you.
They crushed and used you.
I look at your world,
And see it is burning.
While my broke heart gently weeps.
With every misdeed,
You must surely be hurting.
Still my broke heart gently weeps.
I don’t know why you were deserted,
You were perverted too.
I don’t know why you weren’t converted,
No one supported you.
I look at you Mom,
See the pain there that’s sleeping,
While my broke heart gently weeps.
I see, see my mom.
And my broke heart still weeps.
