Category: Mama Benchly

In one of her songs, Ani DiFranco sings “we all owe our lives to the people that we love.” I was reminded of this quote a few days ago when Hypothetical and I were discussing how our interactions (both good and bad) with loved ones have molded us into the people we are today. It feels as though only the ones you truly let into your heart have the chance to alter your existence and they can do so by hurting you or loving you, or both. I’ll leave the loved-ones-who-have-hurt-me discussion for another day and focus simply on the ones who have loved me, and specifically, the ones who have loved me the most: my parents.

I spent the first 25 years of my life trying to understand Mama Benchly and began to think I never would. She purchases old photographs from flea markets, frames them, hangs them up on the wall, and devises a back story for each one; she once tried to convince me that cows could stand on hills because their left legs were longer than their right ones; the only care package she ever sent me in college contained a short note, a dozen washcloths, and nearly a pound of peanuts; and she has a dream catcher hanging in the rear view mirror in her car.

(For those unfamiliar with the Native American tool, the dream catcher is said to separate the bad dreams from the good. Some believe they let the good dreams pass while trapping and destroying the bad ones, while others believe the bad dreams pass through the center while the good ones are preserved for life in the web. Regardless, I thought the location for the dream catcher was odd and one day, I told her:

Me – “Is that necessary?”
Mama Benchly – “What?
Me – “The dream catcher.”
Mama Benchly – “Why not?”
Me – “Well, is sleeping something you really want to encourage the driver to do?”
Mama Benchly – “You don’t need sleep to dream. This is for your daydreams.”)

For a number of years, when asked to describe her, I said Mama Benchly was weird. Then, with the guilt hiding behind that insult finally weighing me down, I began calling her eccentric. That was soon followed by the vague “one of a kind” or “unique” descriptions; and then, one day not too long ago, I had two revelations: 1. my mother’s imagination is more lively and inspiring than an entire kindergarten class on a rainy day; and 2. Any creativity I possess can be traced back to its origin: my mother (eg, my clock on the wall that’s forever at 3 o’clock and whose presence gives me both stability in a chaotic world and a punchline with a Matchbox Twenty reference; the candle in the fishbowl surrounded by fake seaweed and real seashells; the window panes that I turned into a coffee table; the picture frame hanging diagonally in the kitchen that frames nothing except the vertically striped wall; etc.).

And then there’s Papa Benchly. Yes, he’s sensitive but he’s also endlessly caring; yes, he’s critical, but he’s also remarkably forgiving; yes, his life is built around traditions, but he also seeks out and embraces change; yes, no matter the weather or the day or the time of day, he’s always reading or doing crossword puzzles, but he’s also the most intelligent person I’ve ever met; yes, he’s stubborn, but…OK, well, he’s stubborn; yes, he’s self-conscious and shy, but he’s also one of the greatest public speakers and story tellers to whom I’ve ever listened. That last one took me longer than it should have to realize.

Papa Benchly has been a minister my whole life and so naturally, some of my earliest memories center around uncomfortable clothing worn on hot summer afternoons in a sticky sanctuary with opened windows that never quite let the breeze in from the outside atheist world, and listening to my father’s booming and clear voice echo throughout the room. For all of elementary school, as should be expected of a child, I was bored out of my mind in church and my only saving graces were the unexpected, yet always rewarding moments in my father’s sermon when he mentioned my name, which, in my head, made me a celebrity. But in my childhood selfishness, I never listened to the remainder of his sermons.

Only recently, and especially this past Easter Sunday, did I realize how well and poignant a story Papa Benchly tells. With Sister #1 on one side of me and Brother-in-Law #1 on the other, I found myself on the edge of my seat, with my next breath hanging on my father’s next thought. I know that people go to church for different reasons (ie, to find God, to find peace, to find answers, to find the familiar, etc), but on this day I realized that somewhere along the line of my life, I began going to church (though irregularly) for my father’s advice. His words give me new meanings to old thoughts, guide me through rough times by providing answers to never-before-asked questions, and help me see what I’ve subconsciously known all along. In a symbiotic way, he has been able to fulfill his responsibilities as a parent by doing his job.

So after coming to the dreaded realization, in the last year or two, that I’ve become my parents, a realization most every 20-something fears and goes to great lengths to ignore or avoid, I’ve also realized that this development isn’t really a bad thing. Yes, my parents have their flaws, which I’ve spent a lifetime silently criticizing, but in the end, their faults are far outweighed by their redeeming traits. And if I could accumulate half of these traits, and gain my father’s sarcasm, and my mother’s bad jokes, and my mother’s creativity, and my father’s intellect, and my mother’s comfort, and my father’s concern, and my mother’s hair, and my father’s nose, and my mother’s superstitions, and my father’s facial expressions, and my mother’s imagination, and my father’s story telling ability, and if I could become just a speck of who they are, I would be all the better for it.