Compare the nations of the world to the members of a family. A family is a nation in miniature. Simply enlarge the circle of the household, and you have the nation. Enlarge the circle of nations, and you have all humanity. The conditions surrounding the family surround the nation. The happenings in the family are the happenings in the life of the nation.

—‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace

In honour of Peggy Wilson Edgerly

Mothers truly are our first teachers, which may explain why we can feel
 so inexplicably alone once they’re gone.

My mother didn’t have a “real” birthday except during leap years, which means that even when her death certificate recorded her age as eighty, she was still technically only twenty-one.

There were beginning to be discernible signs of age, such as the slight bend in her slender frame in the months before the sudden heart attack that ended her life. But the challenge her slate-blue eyes tossed back at the world, even then, always made her seem so much more like a feisty young adult.

Her only grandchildren, our now-adult kids, certainly remember her more this way, I think. Whenever our family comes together now for just about any occasion, it always seems inevitable to remember my mother, who so often was the initiator of welcoming hospitality and reaching out to others. If anyone ever embodied the true spirituality—and joy—of what such acts are really about, my mum sure did.

Mothers truly are our first teachers, which may explain why we can feel so inexplicably alone once they’re gone. What they teach will include things we’ll eventually come to prize, even if we didn’t initially. With each passing year it becomes more obvious how many of the things I value in myself can be traced back to my mother, a military spouse whose life didn’t turn out anything like her twenty-one-year-old self imagined it would.

During the years my dad was at war, my young British war-bride mother held down the fort in her family’s remote north-England home. She cared for my older sister, then a newborn, as well as for an elderly relative in the last stages of cancer, and several children who’d been evacuated from London. I recently learned that my newly postpartum, first-time mother also hooked rugs in order to generate income to compensate for the meager wartime rations on which her crowded household had to subsist.

Having been a young mother myself, I now wonder how she ever found the time to do these things, and I marvel that she took in those young evacuees at all. She knew, however, what kind of life they’d face back home in the city during wartime, because her young face already wore nasty scars from her service as a fire warden during the infamous “Blitzkrieg.”

If anyone modeled for me how to welcome change gracefully, it was my mother, who came to a new culture to meet her Boston-Irish in-laws, then proceeded to make a home for her family—over and over—in locations all over the world where her military spouse was stationed. Her deliberate and dedicated “nesting” efforts are some of my oldest memories. They gave every place we lived that consistent feeling of home that I could recognize anywhere, even though we were constantly uprooted and forced to start over in place after place.

Life in a military family meant I had to keep making new friends, and my mother, as with most everything, encouraged me in this endeavor and did her best to turn it into an adventure. She made it easier to nurture friendships by always welcoming playmates at our house and utterly charming them with her warmth. (They usually loved her accent, too.) Friends still talk about how inviting it was at our house, while I grew up believing that’s how it was everywhere.

Because she was such a canny yet unobtrusive ally in assisting our friendships, my sister and I now find it easy to make friends wherever we go, to be the one to go talk to someone standing alone at a party, as we often saw her do. With her lively mind, she always had friendly, interesting questions that would gently coax people into the nicest conversations, even if she had to ask them in a language she was struggling to learn.

Long before the days of what the sixties would label Women’s Lib, military spouses like her were already demonstrating women’s versatility and capability, strong models for their daughters—and sons. When you’re so often the only parent on the scene, there’s simply no room for the kind of thinking that’s limited by gender bias.

Among other invaluable gifts, she was able to listen in a way that made you feel priceless, like listening to you at that moment was the most important thing in the world. She also taught me how to value and use my own time—not just to be efficient and accomplish things, important as that is, but to also savor and enjoy something worth enjoying.

It makes me more than a little sad that I can so easily recognize these things now that she isn’t here to thank in person, but I also know that millions of parents have gone to great lengths for their children and never received the acknowledgment they deserve.

“A father and mother endure the greatest troubles and hardships for their children; and often when the children have reached the age of maturity, the parents pass on to the other world,” the Bahá’í writings acknowledge. “Rarely does it happen that a father and mother in this world see the reward of the care and trouble they have undergone for their children. Therefore, children, in return for this care and trouble, must show forth charity and beneficence, and must implore pardon and forgiveness for their parents.”1

After my mother’s death, the one thing I heard most consistently from the many people who loved her was how much kindness and help she had always shown them. It’s quite clear, therefore, how I can best honor her memory. Being someone who consistently demonstrated kindness and generosity is likely the most important lesson my first teacher ever gave me.

So, thanks for everything, Mum. And you’ll always be twenty-one to me.