My mother was a poet. She wrote rhyme and serious poetry too from a very early age—some of which she was able to sell during the days before she married my dad. But my dad put a stop to all that when he commented, “Edgar Allen Poe wrote poetry. Do you want to end up like him?”
One year, during a time when our family was struggling to pay for farm land and a house, my mother had no money to buy me a birthday gift, so she wrote a poem and handed it to me early that morning. Penned on a piece of white paper, she had written:
When I was a little girl of eleven,
I got up each morning at seven.
I helped to do the dirty dishes,
And while I worked I made my wishes.

Once I wished for a baby brother;
He came and then came another.
…………….
…and that is all I remember…
What happened? Why is the memory of that poem gone from me?
Flash back to the farmhouse when I was at home with my parents and three brothers. The eldest brother was four years older than I and quite the precocious firstborn. I was the normal child second child, but also a struggling over-achiever, who dared not let her guard down for fear of being thought inferior. I constantly battled a spelling disability. Oh, I made good grades—even got 100% on every spelling test, but it did not come naturally with me. I was aware of my deficiencies, and always struggled to do better. Now that said, what does all that have to do with the forgotten poem?
A line or two after the lines I remember, my mother had spelled the word night as nite (poetic license I did not understand). I caught it and gleefully pronounced, “You have a misspelled word there.”
She snatched back the paper and I never saw it again. I was the ungrateful child who got no present that year because I had stabbed my mother’s heart with words—words similar to my Daddy’s words early in their marriage. Perhaps I did not have a poet’s heart as she had dreamed I might, so I was never to be the beneficiary of her poetry again.
You might say that was a harsh lesson, and it was. Today my heart aches for the loss of the poem, but most of all for the pain I inflicted on my mother. These are the rebukes I take from that hard lesson.

1. Whether or not I was old enough to understand poetic license, I needed to learn to think before I spoke. In Proverbs 18:13, Solomon says, “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.”

2. I was a foolish child who did not show honor to my mother (Eph. 6:2-3).

3. I was indeed a foolish child to insult my own mother the way I did, but I should have had the blessing of forgiveness when I repented (Luke 6:37; Mark 11:26; Matt 6:15). Perhaps my mother was a bit foolish too.

–Beth Johnson
“…Remember me, O my God, for good”​ ​(Neh. 13:31b).

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Muliebral Studies
Muliebral Viewpoint