Hug Your Mom For Me!

Each year at Mother’s Day, I realize once again that my mother is gone and I don’t think about her enough. Lois Brown Metoyer, a beautiful courageous woman, lost her battle with brain cancer in June of 1972, just as I was finishing my junior year in college. She was 43 years old when she died and I had no idea then how young she was. She’s been gone now for almost 37 years, actually dead much longer then she was alive in my world. It still doesn’t seem possible because she was once so full of life.

I think of how Mom and I had clashed throughout my high school years. My parents had insisted that I go to an all-white, all boys’ school and we had also moved to a white neighborhood. It wasn’t that we sought the company of white folks. It was that my parents fought to integrate areas that had always been segregated and they had the courage to be pioneers. What’s the point of fighting racism if you’re unwilling to meet it face to face? But being a pioneer had its’ issues and for me it was girls; there were none at school or in my neighborhood.

Mom didn’t want me to date until I was a junior in high school and had a fit if she ever caught me talking to girls on the phone. So I would sneak to the phone booth at the mall or to a service station to call the only black girls I knew. There were white girls living in my neighborhood, but my Mom would have murdered me in my sleep if she ever caught me looking at one. She didn’t hate white women; in fact she had many white friends. But she hated the thought of a black man dating anyone outside his race. If she had met Sammy Davis Jr. in 1960, he would have lost his other eye, after he got married to white, Swedish born actress May Britt.

There’s no doubt that Mom wanted the best for me and I knew that. But it was a time when I felt smothered. She had no brothers, so she had no idea how to raise boys. There were four kids in our family and I was the oldest boy. So I guess I was the test case for her and her two younger sisters. One of my last high school memories was about my hair and graduation. She wanted it short and close cropped, while I wanted an Afro.

“I can’t stand that AFRO mess”, she said, “Your hair doesn’t fit under the cap”.

Dad took me to the barber shop that night and supervised the hair cut. He tried to compromise, because he understood how I felt.When I came back home, she still wasn’t happy, but Dad calmed her down. Later he gave me these words of advice,

“Son, no matter what, don’t upset your mother!”

Later that night I walked the stage and got my diploma as my parents looked on. My Dad shook my hand and said congratulations. But all Mom saw was my hair,

“I can’t believe you had that AFRO mess”! So much for the joy of graduation night.

Three months later, I went away to college at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Mom and Dad drove me down there and helped me move into the room. They looked at each other and Dad said,

“Well son, we better go so you can get settled in.”

For the first time I could remember, my mom was speechless. She just looked at me from behind her shades and I realize now that she was crying.

“I’ll walk you to the car”, I said, as I suddenly realized I was about to be alone.

“No son, you stay here, we’re ok!”

We said our goodbyes and I watched them walk down that long hallway, with my Dad’s arm around her. I thought she’d be glad to see me go. But it wasn’t until then that I realized that she loved me very much, even though we always seemed at odds.

My college years were a blur spent focusing on my own selfish ideas of what it meant to be grown. I never called home and never came back. I wanted to prove that I could live on my own and support myself. But my world and the world of my family was rocked when we learned that Mom had a brain tumor that required surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. The doctors said they got it all and there was hope.

I came home for the summer and could tell she was suffering. But we found a way to communicate through music. We both loved jazz and rhythm and blues. When I came home from work, I discovered that she was stealing my records and playing them on her stereo.

“How did that get up here?” she would say, “You must have left that on my record player”! We both laughed, knowing that she was the one with sticky fingers.

But a few months later we learned that the cancer was back and that it had spread through her body. There was nothing else the doctors could do. I came back home from school to visit and could see the change in her face and I knew that she was dying. She searched my face when I came in the hospital room and she could read me like a book. Tears started rolling down her eyes as she looked at me, knowing what I was thinking. By now she couldn’t speak because the cancer had taken her motor skills away. So we just looked at each other in a long glance, reading each others thoughts.

A few weeks later, Mom was gone, freed from the suffering of being trapped inside a body that didn’t work anymore. To this day I am filled with regret, that we didn’t have more time to get past those teen age friction years. I wish that I could have shown her that I was going to do something with my life, but we ran out of time. Two years after she died, I was a successful TV anchor in our hometown, but my Mom never got to see it once. Fortunately my Dad was still there, and we became great friends as adults. But you know how it is; we want to make our Moms proud first; that’s why everyone says “Hi Mom” on TV. Of course there’s no telling what she would have said, because I did the news with a BIG AFRO!

So please do me this favor. Hug your Mom for me, and let her know how much you love her.Hug her like you know that she won’t be there one day; celebrate her life, her wisdom, her grace and beauty. Hug her like you don’t ever want to let go, even though one day you’ll have to. Prepare for the day you have to say goodbye, by making sure that you didn’t miss a “reasonable” chance to make her happy. And remember my dad’s advice,

“No matter what, don’t upset your mother!”

Happy Mother’s Day Mom, I love you always!