How well do we know our parents? Occasionally I think about the things I’ve never told my daughter. This was brought home to me when, looking through a box hurried packed after my mother’s funeral, I came across an artifact. I should say that my mother died going on a year ago, and the emotions had been a bit too raw to look at the things I’d picked up in a moment of grief. This particular artifact was one of her Bibles. Mom never had as many Bibles as I do (or did). I remember distinctly asking for, as my sole Christmas present, the New International Version when it came out in 1978. I have no idea how I knew about it (pre-internet) but I was pretty tapped into evangelicalism then. I still have that Bible. I also have the Bible my grandmother gave me in 1970, when, at the age of eight, I was, as it is termed, “saved.”
What makes my mother’s Bible an artifact, to me, is the information inscribed on the various dedication pages. The Bible was my mother’s sixteenth birthday gift. That made me stop and think. Mom used to tell me about being a rebellious youth (she did not get along with her mother). She smoked and drank and eventually married someone her parents disapproved of. She gave up smoking when she was pregnant and gave up drinking when she saw what it was doing to her alcoholic husband. I wonder what my mother’s rebellious years were like. My entire life she was just “Mom.” As stable as she could be, religious as she needed to be, and as selfless as a saint.
How did she feel as a sixteen-year-old receiving a Bible as a birthday present? I never got to ask her that, but she saved the Bible and even did a DIY recovering of it with shelf-paper when the faux leather cover began to come apart. It was a King James Version, and I knew from conversations with her that she preferred The Living Bible because it was easier for her to read (she never finished high school). Ours were lives defined by the Good Book. I don’t know the story of what prompted that sixteenth birthday gift. I was sixteen when I begged for the NIV. Now I work surrounded by Bibles. And I’m no closer to knowing what it was that my mother really wanted when she turned sixteen. I do know, however, that it eventually defined my life.