Call your mom

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Call your mom

Call your mom while you’re at college.

It took me four months, a reminder from the dean, and a nasty email to figure that out. In fact, do it every week, your life will improve.

If I am truthful, that single injunction is sufficient advice for this whole piece. But heck, I’m a graduating senior, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing this column every three weeks, it’s that I’m in a position for posturing and pontification (in the event that you don’t know, seniors are effectively absolved from stupidity; we can blame it on the fact that our lives are about to change and we are most certainly under emotional duress).

On this note, bear with me in my praise of Jane Francis Andrew and those like her.

When it gets right down to it, moms are weirdly profound. Despite your current aesthetic flare and the recent addition of words like “epistemology” and “Christological” to your vocabulary, you really haven’t changed that much since getting to college, and what you perceive as mom’s hackneyed platitudes are likely truest things to run through our mind since Dr. Gamble told you that America isn’t what you think it is. You want advice? Call home.

Of course, the natural impulse leads one to seek guidance from upperclassmen. To say this is a mistake would be crude and likely an overstatement of things, but your mom is a safer choice. Most importantly she is almost certainly free of a savior complex: that insidious tendency to make freshmen your little sinner that you’ll raise to new life while collecting volunteer hours. The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t be afraid to make that mystery call to the bullpen. Bring in mom. She won’t disappoint.

For instance, my own dear mother asked me recently if I was doing the hard things, like being loyal and gracious with my friends. I replied that I was conflicted about the whole grace thing, I felt as though my will was divided against my flesh, leaving me in existential paralysis, wandering between a platonic hyperspace and this corporeal reality. I also pointed out that the phrase “hard things” is generic and cheap. I really said that. She gave me her equivalent of “strike the crap and answer the question.”

Answer the question: are you being loyal and gracious?

College offers an apparently infinite expanse of time and space in which a person can make any number of friends, run the gamut of philosophical dogmas, and adopt a myriad of personas. The best part: all this comes at the cost of zero commitment. Let’s be real here, what is loyalty and grace in the face of your epic pursuit of identity and truth?  Dislike a roommate’s political standing? Get a new one! Think your pastor is ugly? Find a different church! It is, after all, your education.

If your mother is like my own, she will reply with the sort of things mothers say, turning our conversation back to her initial question about “hard things.” But when given a chance to be heard, she will explain that in one month I will leave those I call my dearest friends, and I will begin to wonder if it was worth it. While my skin will not likely be soaked in boils and my family will probably be alive, I will be removed from those I’ve come to love and there is something unnatural about this. It’s as though the friendships I’ve made have underscored the inevitability of loss and the possibility of suffering. The suggestion, then, that such a thing is “hard” is insightful and perplexing. For to affirm the beauty of human life, to be loyal to your friends, is to accept a vocation with the knowledge that this work, this beauty, may yield sadness. It may yield a vulnerability wherein you are given to the world and told to love it even as it is, to adopt a posture of receptivity without a plan for retreat. And yet this is where mom proposed for the concluding moments of her dear son’s college experience. I’d like to think it’s made a difference.

So call your mom and listen.