What I Learned About Love From My Mother's Daily Boot Camp Letters

She Survived Tornadoes, Earthquakes, and Hurricanes, Then She Raised Me

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY. My mom passed away a few years ago, but I still find myself looking for her in unexpected places. Sometimes in dreams. Sometimes during a late-night rerun of the original Star Trek series she loved so much. Sometimes in moments that arrive without warning and leave just as quickly.

Last week I was at Ninfa’s in Houston when, for no reason I can name, the room thinned and the years fell away. I was about 10 years old again, and she was sitting across the table from me, smiling the way she did back then. The table was the same. The smell of fajitas off the iron skillet was the same. For a moment it felt like time folded in on itself, the way a letter folds when you put it back into an envelope after reading it for the hundredth time.

That image of the letter is not accidental. When I was in Marine Corps boot camp she wrote me every single day. Not most days. Not when she had time. Every single day. At the time those letters were a lifeline, a thin paper bridge from the squad bay back to a world where I was somebody’s son. Looking back now, I realize they were also a quiet lesson in unconditional love, in loyalty, and in the kind of sacrifice that does not announce itself. She did not write because she had something to say. She wrote because I needed her to write. That is mostly what mothers do. They show up, again and again, in the small repetitive ways that nobody tallies but that hold a life together. I still have those letters.

Her name was Elizabeth Francis Muse, although almost no one called her that. She was Beth. She was born in Fort Worth in 1944, married my father, Ralph Buckley Muse Jr., in 1969 at the Marine Corps Chapel in Washington, DC, and stayed married to him for 50 years. She raised two children. She fed and entertained more friends than she could count. She painted in oil and acrylic. She made stained glass. She belonged to churches and clubs and Mahjong tables and a women’s investment group, and she could sometimes finish 10 books in a single week. That is the obituary version, and it is true as far as it goes.

But obituaries always tell the safest version of a person, and Mother’s Day, of all days, deserves the unsafe version. So let me tell you about the Beth Muse you might not have met.

When she was a girl in Memphis she won one of the largest pageants in the country and was crowned Little Miss Maid of Cotton. She did not bring it up much. It was the kind of thing she would mention only if someone else mentioned it first, and even then she would look slightly embarrassed about it, as if a crown were a thing you outgrew rather than displayed.

She was expelled from college after being caught with a boy after curfew. By the time she reached the University of Delaware and the University of Houston she was already married, which solved that problem. Her love of learning survived being thrown out of school for breaking a rule that today sounds like a quaint joke.

In her twenties, before she met my father, she traveled the world on her own. She crossed Europe, the Caribbean, and South America with no companion and no itinerary I have ever been able to reconstruct. The irony, which she would never have called irony, is that she firmly opposed her own daughter doing the same thing decades later, even when my sister was already in her forties. Mothers are allowed to revise the rule book that they themselves once tore up. That is one of their privileges.

She agreed to marry my father after just three dates over three weeks. Three dates. I have spent more time choosing a kitchen appliance. When she said yes, she said yes to my father’s career that would move her more than 15 times over 50 years, deploy her husband at sea for long stretches, and put her aboard the USS Biddle, his guided missile cruiser, for two separate Christmases. She climbed onto a warship at Christmas because that is where her husband was, and she was not the kind of woman who required the holiday to come to her.

When she lived in Washington, DC, she drove a right-hand drive Lotus that had once raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. She had funny stories about getting pulled over for speeding in it. I have never quite been able to picture her in that car, which I think is the point. The whole purpose of telling this story is to remind myself that my mother had a life before I had a mother.

When we lived in New York she decided she should learn to fly a glider. She wanted to harness the wind, in her words, and she did, and she flew right over our house at one point. The house was destroyed by a tornado not long afterward, which she always told as if it were a punchline, although obviously it was not. After the tornado we moved to Memphis, where she rode out a magnitude 6.0 earthquake. Then the Bay Area, where she rode out a magnitude 5.7. Over the years she sat through at least four hurricanes between Category 4 and Category 5. The world kept trying to shake her loose, and she kept declining the invitation.

Her faith was just as adventurous, and just as ungovernable. She was a lifelong Christian. She was also, at one point, a member of a Unitarian church in Massachusetts that decided to hide Sandinista rebels from Nicaragua in its attic. She objected, on the grounds that the rebels were here illegally, and the church concluded that she was too conservative for them. Years later she went through new member training at a Presbyterian church and was informed by the minister that she was, in fact, too liberal to join. I have always loved this story because it captures her exactly. She did not pick a team and stay there. She picked principles and moved when the team did.

She trained in Reiki, the Japanese relaxation practice, and would lay hands on my sister and me whenever we were not feeling well. She also trained in craniosacral therapy, which involved gently massaging our heads, and she would do that too. I have no idea whether either did anything measurable. I do know that I was a child whose mother was willing to sit beside me, lay her hands on me, and try. That, it turns out, is what most healing actually is.

When I was in junior high she went to live at an ashram for a month to study yoga and meditation. A month. I cannot quite picture the version of mid-1980s Texas motherhood that included an ashram, and yet there it was, because she did not ask permission to be curious. My father also tells me she was a pretty good shot with a .357 magnum. I never saw it. I do not need to. I believe him.

I tell you all of this because I think we tend to flatten our mothers into a single role and then mourn the role rather than the person. The woman who drove the Le Mans Lotus is the same woman who wrote me every day in boot camp. The girl in the Maid of Cotton crown is the same woman who climbed aboard a guided missile cruiser to spend Christmas with her husband. The new age yoga student is the same woman whose Christianity got her thrown out of two churches, for opposite reasons. She was not a saint. She was a person. The miracle of motherhood, as best I can tell, is not that ordinary women become saintly. It is that complicated, opinionated, contradictory women learn to subordinate the loudest parts of themselves to the quiet daily work of raising someone else.

That is what I miss most. Not any one story. The accumulation. The thousands of small choices she made, day after day, to be present in a life that was not hers.

This is why Mother’s Day matters. It is the one day each year when we are encouraged to look at the women who raised us and see the whole person, the one who existed before we did and the one who reshaped herself, again and again, so we could exist comfortably. The mother who packed your lunch had a life before she met your father. The mother who drove you to practice once thought she would do something else with her Saturdays. The mother who answered the phone at 2 a.m. could have, in another life, been the woman in the Lotus.

She did not stop being any of those women, of course. She just made room for you. That is the part most of us only understand after she is gone, and even then we understand it slowly, in flashes.

So today, if your mother is still here, call her. Not to ask her anything. Just to let her know that you can see her, all of her, the woman as well as the role. If she is gone, the way mine is, look for her in the unexpected places. They are not as unexpected as they seem. They are the places she always was, waiting patiently for you to notice.

I miss my mother deeply. I admire her more with every passing year. And I thank God I was lucky enough to be her son.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, Beth Muse, and to all the mothers who shaped us, carried us, believed in us, and never really leave us.

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