Altar Call – Opelika-Auburn News
Walter Albritton
May 8, 2016
Remembering the influence of my mothers
Each
year Mother’s Day reminds me to give thanks for the three women who have so
greatly influenced my life. The first is my mother, Caroline Johnson
Albritton. The second is Sarah Danford Brown, my
wife’s mother. The third is my wife, Dean, the mother of our five sons.
Last week my son Steve
brought me a book he found in the attic of the home in which I grew up. The
moth-eaten book is titled Pinocchio
by Carlo Collodi. Inside the front cover is my name,
obviously printed by my mother, with the date “1939.” Assuming the book was a
birthday gift, I was seven years old and soon to finish the first grade.
The book reminds me how my
mother encouraged me to read. Using McGuffey
Readers and a Bible full of pictures, my mother instilled in me a love of
reading. Since this was before the arrival of television, books were my great
source of adventure. I read voraciously the Rover Boys series and loved the book about Tarzan. He was one of my
earliest heroes.
Mama pushed me to do well in school. I can
remember reading by the light of a kerosene lamp, knowing that I had to finish
my homework right after supper on school nights. Sometimes Mama would use an
alarm clock to make sure I spent what she considered enough time studying. She
was in control.
Though I got tired of being
told what to do, I realized years later that her discipline helped me become a
better person. I suppose most children get tired of being told what to do, when
to be home, and to clean up our room one more time. We long to be sixteen and
get a driver’s license. We want to escape parental control, become adults, get
married and do what we please.
When we are
young we don’t think much about dying and going to heaven. Heaven will be
having our own home with no fastidious parents to boss us around. We long to be
free of having someone saying, “Make up your bed, pick up your clothes, and
take the garbage out!"
So at age
twenty I persuaded my childhood sweetheart to get married. How foolish we were.
We had hardly two hundred dollars between us. But Dean and I found an apartment
for fifty dollars a month in Auburn, and set up housekeeping. We had very
little but we had each other and I was free at last of my mother’s
domination.
Then I began to discover what
marriage is all about. There was still a woman in the house who expected me to
make up my bed, pick up my dirty clothes and take out the garbage. There was
still a woman who wanted to know where I had been, where I was going, and what
time I would be home. There was still a woman with me who wanted me to dress
neatly, behave myself and do my best.
Slowly it
dawned on me that a man does not do well without a woman in his life. From
infancy it had been my mother who helped me. From now on the helper would be my
wife. She took over where my mother left off. My job was to figure out how to
be her helper too, without sounding like her mother. Like me she needed someone
to take the place of her mother in her life.
Tension took
its toll during the early years of our marriage. We struggled to learn our
roles in this strange thing called matrimony. I had to understand what she
meant when she said heatedly, "I am your wife, not your mother!"
Likewise she had to learn what I meant when I told her in no uncertain terms,
"I am your husband, not your father!" Gradually we learned the hard
way how to live together.
Adjustments are seldom
easy. I never dreamed that within a few years I would be living with two women.
Dean’s mother came to live with us and except for the time she stayed with
Dean’s sister Dot, she was with us until she passed away at age
99.
After the passing of our mothers I realized that God had blessed me
with two mothers. Sarah was a good woman who helped me more than twice as many
years as my own mother. She was not a career woman, though she did work for
some years as a prison matron. Her life was her children and her grandchildren.
Her greatest joy was doing something to help her family.
Sarah hated dirt. A thousand
times I watched her go on a rampage against a dirty floor or a dirty
refrigerator, and she always won. Our lives were better because of the tireless
labor of the woman who earned the title I gave her – "Mrs.
Clean."
There were many times when
we did not get along well. I thought it was her fault. She was simply
impossible to live with. Years later I realized that I was more difficult to
live with than she was. After many wars and rumors of wars we found a way to
live together. That only happened after I recognized that it was contending
with me that made Sarah cantankerous at times. At long last I realized how
indebted I was to her for allowing me to marry her daughter and for helping us
to raise our children.
On this Mother’s Day I
know that I am a blessed man. I had the good fortune of having two mothers to
whom I am indebted beyond my capacity to repay. One helped me for 18 years to
grow up and become a responsible husband and father. The other helped me for 50
years to raise a family and pursue my calling as a pastor. I shall never
forget the gracious compliment Sarah paid me one Sunday after church. She said,
“Walter, you were born to preach!”
Caroline and Sarah played
a powerful role in my life. My greatest regret is that I did not fully express
my gratitude to them while they were living. I wish I had given them the joy of
hearing from my own lips how much they meant to me. They both loved me beyond
my deserving.
Dean, of course, is the
gracious lady who has meant the most to me. While we have been married for
nearly 64 years, I have known her for 78 years – since we sat near each other
on the front row in the first grade.
Though words cannot
adequately convey my affection for her, today I will tell her again how much I
love her for her kindness, her faith, her patience, her unwavering love and her
constant encouragement. Without her by my side I would have gone down the drain
a long time ago. In tough times she has always been a pillar of strength. But she
is tender as well as tough. I love it when she sits at her piano and plays old
songs, for my ears, about “needing some kissing”!
On this Mother’s Day I give
thanks for the three mothers who have made me one blessed man. Thanks
be to God for Dean, Caroline and Sarah! + + +