This Terrible Tenderness

World Cancer Day 2018
By Karen Burton Mains

When our last-born child, Jeremy, was younger, he used to complain regularly about the privileges of his older brothers and sister.

“Why don’t I get to do all the things Randy and Joel and Melissa get to do,” he would whine—frequently. My reply always was, “Just wait. Just wait. When they all grow up and leave home, you will be older, then you will be able to do all the things that they all do.”

Of course, that parental prophecy came true. When the older siblings were in college, or getting married, moving to their own homes and entering their first jobs, Jeremy was the only child left with us—a teen home alone, a high-schooler, then a college student, and finally a young adult, and he got to do a whole lot of the things he had always wanted to do.

Early, Jeremy exemplified a cross-cultural curiosity. At 16, he decided to study Japanese, arranged for a tutor, then nagged us to let him go to Japan through the contacts of a mutual friend for a whole summer living with Christian Japanese folk we had never met. Striking a bargaining advantage, he insisted that a several-month-language-and-cultural plunge was exactly what he needed. Missionaries to Japan, whom I went to for advice as this plan was forming in Jeremy’s mind, counseled, “If you don’t let him do it now, he might not want to go later.”

So we did; we sent him off across the ocean to a country we had never visited to stay with hospitable people we had never met. He came home a changed, more mature and much, much less picky eater than the teenager we had sent off early that summer.

After Jeremy returned from Japan, he began studying Spanish. Again, a close friend and missionary in Mexico agreed to arrange for him to live in Mexico for the whole next summer. And that is what our son did. He lived in a mountain village somewhere in the state of Puebla, helping to build shelter for a widow. Then he contracted the mumps, which added a personal health experience to another three-month-long language-and-culture plunge.

Almost 40 years ago, we purposely moved from the city of Chicago, where we had planted an inter-racial church in 1967, to West Chicago, a suburb where the demographic was 60 percent Hispanic. In high school, distressed by the prejudice against this immigrant community, Jeremy designed a social studies project where he interviewed his classmates regarding their assumptions about the Hispanic community and then interviewed his senior-class Mexican friends.

Despite the bias of white Americans, Jeremy discovered the Mexican immigrant community worked hard (some of his young Mexican friends held down two or three part-time jobs to help their families), held to high family values and wanted to be successful American citizens.

Jeremy arranged for a social in the basement of the nearby Episcopal church that would mix the two groups. I, la madre, the head of the refreshment committee, was introduced to a novel idea—male “uncles,” who accompanied their nieces or god-daughters or young female friends of the family to these mixed socials. Mostly young men themselves, they were a formidable presence, as they sat at the edges of the room, arms crossed, observing the interactions of the young men and women (mostly the young men, I’m guessing).


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