Things my Mother taught me: Reflections on a life lived and poured out.

Things my Mother taught me: Reflections on a life lived and poured out. 

As I sit down to write this, my Mother Joyce Marilyn Johnson (Belcher) is lying in her Hospice bed in the Waupaca, WI hospital. Her kidneys are failing her and the clock on what are the final moments of her too short life has begun to tick down. We all knew this time was coming when we started to see her health slipping away all too fast just over 2 years ago. Now it is here, and so also begins that strange time in ones life when all sorts of people you've known and loved over the years make their journey to your bedside for one last conversation.

I'll start as far back as I can. I first met my mom on a wintry day in December 1980. It was just a few days before Christmas and suddenly there I was face to face with this amazing woman. She said my name was to be Britton James. Named after her father Emerson William Britton Belcher who had just past away a few months prior to my arrival. In my ever thoughtful manner I had shown up just in time to be her Christmas present that year. Of course no one remembers the day they were born, which is probably a good thing. I hear it's a pretty traumatic event in ones life. You get pulled from this place where your every need is being met 24/7, and thrust into a cold world where all you know how to do is scream. And if you're as lucky as I was, you get a Mom. Someone to wrap you up, tell you its going to be ok, begin the long and yet suddenly too short process of taking care of your every need for the next 18 years and beyond.

I'm sure those first few years of mine weren't all that easy for my mom, after all I was number 4 of 4 boys. She'd had plenty of experience raising boys by the time I came along. But still besides me there were 3 others she had to deal with. We lived in Milwaukee Wisconsin then, and my Father was the Pastor of a Church. So naturally we all spent a lot of time at Church. Normally during Church I would sit with mom, fall asleep on the pew next her, and wake up usually with my face covered in a weird fabric pattern and slightly wet from drooling all over myself. A few times I would sit on the other side of the Church with my friends. If we were having too good a time sitting next to each other and not behaving, I would suddenly hear this "snap" from the other side of the Church. I'd look at Mom and she'd give that look that said "you sit down and be quiet right this second or I will take you outside and spank your misbehaving bottom into tomorrow". So I did what her eyes told me to. Except for that one time I didn't and she held up her end of the bargain. It was after one of those times that I prayed to accept Christ for the first time as a kid. Maybe I knew what I was doing , or maybe I was really convinced I had been a bad kid by not listening to my mom, and only Jesus could save me now.

My brothers were all old enough to attend the school at our Church but the school didn't have a Kindergarten, so I had to go to the Public schools. I went to school one morning and as can happen when you're in Kindergarten you get to school and suddenly you don't feel too good. I remember puking , I don't know where, next thing I'm being looked at by someone and suddenly they're telling me my mom is there to take me home. They tell me to go outside and she'll take me home. I walk outside, I think I was alone, and there's this Blue Buick sitting there. I'm just a kid, but I think that's not our car, man, I must be really sick because it looks like my mom stole someones car just to come pick me up from school! Well it was our car, sort of. Dad had pledged to raise a certain amount of money for the Church Building program and buying and reselling cars was how he was going to raise the money. This blue Buick was a car he had for a few days before flipping it for more money. Still it was pretty cool to have your mom show up seemingly out of nowhere. And in some strange car come to rescue you and take you home and put you to bed and make you anything you want. Mom's are incredible. I bet she would have stolen that car if she had to.

Sometime after that we left Milwaukee and moved up to Waupaca into an unfinished house in the middle of winter with no heat. I'm sure now that we were breaking all kinds of code and other laws. But hey, sometimes you do what you have to. I never remember mom ever complaining that she didn't have carpet, or a complete kitchen or walls or a furnace. It was like living on the frontier, complete with a trek the outhouse if you had to go in the middle of the night. An outhouse that my mother built. She was Canadian and I think that helped make her a little bit tougher. She was never frazzled by anything, she took life as it came to her day after day. We eventually got the house up to code, and had an nice place to live. It was really the house that God built. People would just show up and say, "hey I'm a professional this or that and heard you need help doing what I do, so I'll help you for free." That outhouse was built so well, it stood until earlier this year when my oldest brother ripped it down and burnt it up. She built it well.

After living in the half way finished house for almost two years, Dad finally got a call from the Lord and a Church in of all places, Salem, Ohio. So we moved down there for three years, somewhat regularly coming back to Wisconsin. I think mom enjoyed not living in a construction site, and they had some people renting the house and at the same time making further progress on it for us. This was a very fast 3 years during which a lot happened. My oldest brother went to Springfield, MO and he's still there today. My second oldest brother got his first of what would be countless jobs. My third oldest brother discovered he liked playing basketball, except on the carpeted gym floor at the Church School. I, well, what did I learn? I learned the important things from my mom like keep your mouth over your plate when you're eating so you don't spill on your nice Sunday pants. I learned that my mom lived another life as a school teacher when she substituted at the Church school one day. She didn't get my class but some friends of mine instead. They all said she was really good. Its always a little shocking when you first realize that your mom is more than just your mom. When you suddenly wake up to the fact that shes like this real person that had a life before you ever showed up. Almost makes you feel guilty like maybe I interrupted something she was doing. It was about this time, that I started doing my own laundry and taking more independent care of myself. Maybe that way mom can get back to whatever it was she was doing before I started distracting her with things like tying my shoes for the 50th time.

Eventually we moved back to Waupaca. For some reason we were all ok with it. I'm sure it was just God moving us on, trying to show us more. So on we went. We moved in the middle of the school year and mom home schooled us through that year, and the older two brothers that were left eventually both graduated and moved out. Since I was the only one left I decided to stay with the homeschooling and drive around the country with Mom and Dad as they spoke and sang at Churches from Baltimore to Wyoming to Canada. Somewhere in there I helped mom record her first studio record down the road from our house with our neighbor Dale. I was sort of the Executive Producer of the Album. I think it was some of her best work. We literally traveled and stayed in almost every kind of situation. And as always mom never complained about where we were. So neither did I. We just tried to love people, and see if we could figure out if there was one  special person we were sent to that town for. One place we stopped at in Iowa, we stayed with the Pastor of the church we were visiting and his family. It was plainly obvious they were the ones that needed the help. The house was breaking down all around, Dad and I fixed several broken things, while mom went shopping for new Towels and Bath items. The ones they had been using were worn through. Any money the church gave to us that week, pretty much went right back to the Pastor and his family. Eventually I started high school and stopped travelling so much with them. Mom and Dad both said they missed me, but they understood.

 When I was in High school I was helping my dad build a shed in the back yard, learning the finer points of roofing. What was mom doing? She was splitting wood, with an ax! That's right , she was so tough she split wood by hand with an ax. Somehow or another though she accidentally moved her splitting area too close to a clothes line. It was like slow motion as I looked up from where I was on the roof of the shed with Dad, she was in mid swing, the ax handle hit the line, rebounded back at her and hit her square in the head. She was on the ground rolling around in pain by the time we got down to her. Miraculously all she ended up with was a headache and a bump on her head. No blood, no vomiting, I'm not even sure she had a concussion. She made today's NFL players look like whiny little kids.  Did I mention Canadians are tough?

I graduated and moved myself to the big city, Madison. Mom and Dad kept preaching and singing wherever they could. They were getting fewer and fewer places to go to though, and this I think was hard for both of them. Feeling like they had things to do, but no place to do them. At the same time Mom started to really miss her Canadian family. She hadn't been back to see them in more than a decade. So my brothers and I got together and bought them a trip out West to visit her brothers. They toured the north part of North America for a couple weeks, and Mom still talks about how fun it was to go home and see her big brothers. She received telephone calls from almost all of them just today. Some of them she hadn't spoken too again in a very long time. Each time she hung up, both she and brother were in tears. A lot of time, distance and still much love between these big boys, and their only little sister.

Mom grew up in British Columbia Canada. The north part of the Pacific Northwest which is a truly gorgeous part of the world and a place I could easily call home without much effort.  She had 3 older brothers. Her mother passed away from a brain hemorrhage or aneurysm when she was only 7 years old. Naturally she has little memories of the woman who was her mother. After her mother passed, her father (my namesake) put an ad in the paper that read. "Seeking a live in housekeeper and nanny , object matrimony". Clearly he preferred the direct approach. Amazingly upon reading the ad, mom's step mother knew instantly that she was to marry this man. So she did. My mom went on to a 3 year college in Canada and got her teaching degree. After graduating she packed an old steamer trunk, and moved to the other side of Canada and got a job teaching in a little school house in Newfoundland. Making very little money for over a year she met another teacher that told her if she went to the States and did one more year of school and got her Bachelors, she could double her income. So she found Central Bible College in Springfield, MO, applied and went. There she met dad and the rest as they say is history.

So now mom waits, she waits for her body to wear out. She waits for Jesus to call her home. At least in the mean time she has lots of visitors to stop in or call. Lots of people to remember good times with, pray with, and just sit with her.

This is the least I can do to honor her, show her what she has meant to me. Show her that her life had meaning. Show her that she did the best she could, which to me, was pretty close to perfect.

I love you mom, I will miss you.


Yours,

Britton