	Bob Hostetler > Writing

My Mother’s Secret

by Bob Hostetler

It was the late 1960s, and my family was the poorest on the block in a solidly middle-class neighborhood. My friends sported the latest fashions; I wore my brothers’ hand-me-downs. Other homes on the block boasted fine furnishings and color televisions; our carpets were threadbare and I was convinced our black-and-white television was old enough to have broadcast John Cameron Swayze reporting the invention of the wheel. Other families parked two cars in their garages; my father worked long hours to keep our 1957 Ford Fairlane running, and my mother rode the bus an hour each way to her job every day.

Yet for all our apparent poverty, we were the only family I knew that employed an ironing lady and a cleaning woman. In the days before permanent press, my father would take a basket of clothes (which Mom had pre-dampened and rolled up) to a woman named Mers every week. Mers was a widow, and everyone called her “Mers.” She even referred to herself that way—never “Mrs. Mers,” just “Mers.” She was a long-time member of the Salvation Army church we attended, and was a central character in a drama that played itself out in our family every week. We would drive far across town to Mers’ tenement apartment, pick up the basket of
ironing, and pay her for her work. Once home, Mom took the clothing out piece by piece, and ironed it again.

“Why do you do that?” one of us would ask.

“She missed a spot,” Mom would say.

“But you do this all the time,” her questioner would say. “Why do we pay Mers to iron for us if you’re just going to do it over?”

Mom would sometimes blush from the implied reproach in our words. But she would shrug or smile and say, “Mers needs the money.”

It was the same with our cleaning lady. Another widow living on a limited income, Mrs. Grubb came to our house every week. She was a cheerless woman who seemed to approach every cleaning task as though we children had created it solely to make her life miserable. She was wrong, of course; there were other reasons. We paid for it, though. Mrs. Grubb left behind a wake of streaked windows, sticky linoleum floors, and half-dusted surfaces every Thursday. Every Saturday, Mom would put me and my brothers to work correcting Mrs. Grubb’s cleaning job.

“Why do you do that?” one of us would ask.

“I don’t want people to think we live in a pig sty,” she would answer.

“But we wouldn’t have to clean so much if we didn’t have a cleaning lady,” we would say. “Why do you pay her to clean if you’re just going to make us do it over a few days later?”

Of course, we knew what the answer would be. “Mrs. Grubb needs the money.”

I never understood that. My mom died when I was still a boy, and her relationship with Mers and Mrs. Grubb mystified me for years. Even as I matured into adulthood, I occasionally reflected on my mother’s quizzical behavior with a wry smile and a shake of the head. I always suspected that there may have been more to her arrangements with Mers and Mrs. Grubb than I could understand at the time, but I never quite got it. Until just recently.

My son arrived home from school one day and saw Tim, a friend of mine, painting my home office.

“Why is he doing that?” my son asked when we were out of Tim’s earshot.

I shrugged. “Because I asked him to.”

“But you just painted the whole first floor last year, didn’t you?”

The words were out of my mouth before I knew it. “He needs the money,” I said.

In that moment, I heard not my own voice, but my mother’s. I remembered how often she had used such words in reference to Mers and Mrs. Grubb, and the light suddenly dawned in my mind and heart. I realized then that, without me even suspecting it, my mother had taught me how to “give to the needy [without letting] your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3, 4, NIV), giving in secret so as to preserve the dignity of those on the receiving end.

My heart swelled with pride as I realized that Mom had passed down her generous, selfless spirit to me. And though Aaron didn’t understand at the time, I hoped that I had planted in my son a seed that would reproduce in him the gift my mother had given to me.

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