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She hadn’t.

Early the next morning, I called my friend Patty, who lives in LA. She was about a forty-five-minute drive from where Jessica had been staying. I told her what was going on, and she offered to call Jessica. I knew Jessica would take Patty’s phone call. It was such a relief to me when Patty said she had talked to her and would be seeing her that day.

A while later, a very humble young woman called me to apologize and on her next visit arrived carrying in her hand my missing designer bag. After we had hung up the phone that night, she had found a place to sell her iPod and gotten enough money to put gas in her car. She had gone back to her friend’s place that night and searched out my stolen purse, confronting the girl for the truth. She managed to leave with it and also regain a bit of self-esteem. She drove back to Utah, straight through, and stayed temporarily at the house we have there until she could find a job and get her own place again.

There are bumps in the road for all of us as we grow up and
struggle to find our identity, but that phone call was truly a turning point for us both. I respected her for having the courage to recover my stolen property, even when her heart was so bruised by this group of friends, and she respected that I had drawn a boundary about helping her continue on a life path that held no promise.

In the years since then, my daughter has been a good teacher for her four youngest siblings. She can tell them of experiences that they think are way out of my realm.

And that’s okay with me, as long as they get the message that keeps them from making bad choices.

In the same way that my parents held us accountable for our gifts, our possessions, and our actions, even more so they held us accountable for our words. If we said we would do something, we had to follow through. Our handshake was our contract. My mom even held us accountable for the words we said about ourselves. She believed that words have a powerful energy. Whenever I had a low-self-esteem day and said something negative about my looks, my body, or my intellectual ability, she would stop me in my tracks; she wouldn’t let me proceed until I said three things that I liked about myself. It embarrassed me, and it would take me a while to come up with three things. That was the point she was trying to make. It’s too easy to talk badly about yourself and can be hard to stop once you start. So don’t even start.

Mostly, my mother was always making sure we didn’t spread harmful lies or gossip about others.

I always wondered why my mother almost always wore a
wig anytime she had to be in public. She wore them shopping and every day when we were out on tour. She wore them to church and when she went to business meetings. I used to joke that being on a tour bus with eight boys and all the male band members, who would kick off their shoes to relax, my mother had to stick her head out of the window for fresh air; then when the bus stopped, she didn’t have to worry about her hair, which had been blown about for hours, as long as she had a wig she could plop on.

When I asked her about it later in her life, I heard the real story. She told me that she used to go to the beauty parlor once a week to have her hair done, but she always felt bad when she left because the women in the salon always gossiped about other women and spoke so badly about their husbands or in-laws or neighbors; it was like a dark cloud would descend on her usually happy spirit. She couldn’t understand how women could betray one another and also their spouses in such a harsh way, saying things that, if repeated, could have destroyed families. She didn’t want to hear it anymore, so she stopped going to a salon.

One windy summer day when I was a young girl, my mother was changing out our old bedding for new pillows and sheets. She decided to demonstrate for us the importance of the ninth commandment, which is “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” She got the idea from a folktale that had been around since the nineteenth century. The story has been retold with different characters in various cultures, but the message is always the same.

My mother cut open an old feather pillow and let us each have a go at shaking the feathers out into the wind. We loved it. Then she told us: “Think of those feathers as your words. Each one is something you say to someone or about them, both good and bad. Now, go and pick up all the feathers that are loose.”

We looked at my mother like she was crazy. The feathers had blown far and wide, across the yard and the road and into the surrounding fields.

“You would never be able to get them all back. Right?”

I was glad that she seemed to be coming to her senses. Of course, it was an impossible task.

She smiled at us and said, “Those feathers scattered everywhere are what it’s like when you gossip or speak badly about another person. Once it leaves your mouth, you can never get it back, no matter how hard you may try or how much you regret saying it. Whoever heard it may repeat it to another, who tells another, and on and on. So guard your words well, because they can either hurt others greatly or be kind and gentle and uplifting.”

As I was writing this, I thought it would be a great lesson to carry forward with my younger kids now. We could drive to the top of one of the foothills surrounding Las Vegas and tear open a pillow. The only issue is, I’ll have to go find an old feather pillow somewhere other than my house. My kids are so attached to their individual feather pillows, it would be like sacrificing a favorite pair of jeans. The message would definitely be lost.

One of the last entries in my mother’s journals was about
accountability. I didn’t read this until after she had passed away: “
For the virtue of accountability to return, parents must teach by example, showing their children the importance of this powerful virtue…. If not, it will continue to lead to destroyed lives. All truths, self and otherwise, will be abandoned by the next generation, a phenomenon we have observed throughout history, leading to nothing but sorrow. I fear for this outcome, and it breaks my heart.
”

We are raising our children in verbally harsh times. The political commercials in which professional adults call one another liars and cheats must be confusing to children who hear them. We seem to live in a culture that celebrates “getting away with something” or twisting the truth to fit our needs, rationalizing our wasting of time, resources, and talents instead of holding ourselves to a higher moral standard. Just look at how we’ve declined as a society. It seems that people only feel bad about a misdeed if they get caught at it.

Like my mother, I “fear for this outcome,” too. I want my children to be able to live in a world where your word counts for something and where they understand and appreciate that the gifts they’ve been given are to be shared and that people always come before possessions. But I also know that, like my mother before me, my husband and I need to be a living example of accountability to our children. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes I just want to say to my kids, “Because I said so” or “Do what I say, not what I do.” However, I doubt any child in history has ever thought that was a truthful or convincing reason to live with integrity.

Above the desk where I’m writing hangs a mother’s quilt I made with my daughter and some close girlfriends after my mother passed away. I wanted to have a way to display the things that meant the most to my mother. One square is a family tree because she loved genealogy; another is a baby dress that her only daughter had worn. There is a square containing the last cross-stitch she was working on, still in the hoop with the needle in the same place she left it. Another section has a black-and-white photo of my parents on their wedding day. Underneath the photo is the treasured string of pearls she wore with her wedding dress, the ones that her own mother had given to her and that she had passed along to me. One of my girlfriends suggested that we embroider one of the sayings that my mother loved and quoted often. I didn’t have to think for very long about which one it would be. She always had this taped up somewhere in the house: “Character is doing what’s right even when no one is watching.”

My own children love to look at the quilt and hear stories about her. She taught by example and lived her own teachings. She was always accountable for her actions and her words. She raised eight boys who are good and loving men, devoted to their families. And she raised me. I know I’ve made far more mistakes than my mother did, but I can only hope that one day my own children will tell their babies and grandbabies a good story about accountability that they learned from me.

I also wonder, looking up at the quilt, if my mother ever spit on that string of pearls.

She owned them, so I think I know the answer.

I love my family ferociously. At my son’s wedding, 2011:
(from left)
Brandon, Matthew, Rachael, Steve, Claire, Stephen, me, Abigail, Brianna, and Jessica.

“W
e thought she was long gone,” a southern California cattle rancher said about one of his all-time favorite cows. For over twenty years, he owned a ranch with almost four thousand acres, near the San Bernardino Mountains. He had bought the cow, he told my mother, right after she gave birth to her first calf, and since then, she had given birth to fourteen more, about one calf every year. Her offspring were always born healthy and sturdy, which made her a cow of great value. Then one day she didn’t return from the pasture to the barn with the others. The rancher’s farmhands drove across most of the property in a Jeep to see if she had strayed or was injured, but returned without a single clue as to what happened to this cow.

The rancher said, “I was sad about it. She was getting older, so I thought some kind of wildlife had caught up to her, but we didn’t find remains. It was kind of a mystery.”

A couple of months later, the rancher and some helpers went out on their twice-a-year trek on horseback to make sure all of the fences on the property were still standing and in good
condition. In one remote section was a steep rocky incline that the rancher usually just rode past on his way to the far corner fence. One of the farmhands pointed out a tree that seemed to be growing at the top of it, which was unusual. Out of curiosity, the rancher coaxed his horse up the tricky slope to see about the tree and how it could possibly grow up there on the solid rock. At the top, where no one had ventured before, the rancher found to his surprise a plateau about the size of a large yard. It had become layered with enough dirt to grow grass. A deep hollowed-out place in the rock had filled with rainwater, which had become a nature-made pond. And growing next to it was one tree. What made the scene even more surreal was that standing under that tree was the missing cow. The rancher said that his jaw dropped down to his horse’s saddle at the sight of the cow he thought he’d never see again. He couldn’t imagine how the cow had found her way there, especially since his horse had had trouble getting up the rocky incline.

“She wasn’t all that happy to see me,” the rancher recalled. “When I walked toward her, she hustled herself away to the farthest grassy edge. She turned to look at me like I had discovered her secret hideaway.”

“What did you do?” my mother had asked him. “How did you get her down from there?”

The rancher laughed and shook his head.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Cows don’t talk, but she was sending me a message loud and clear. I had to listen. She wanted time to herself. There was plenty of grass and water for one cow to live on, and she had the tree for shade. I had to hand it to her: She had
found the perfect getaway. I figured she had already given me the best fifteen years of her life. I couldn’t ask her to leave the patch of private paradise she had found on her own. Who was I to interfere?”

I love this real-life story. When I pass it along to other women, especially mothers, they love it, too. I think it’s because we can all relate to the need for a private space. It’s not that we want to retire and live a solitary life away from our families and children. It’s more that we want time to refill the well so that we have more to give to others. Most women I know have to work really hard, navigating a slippery slope of schedule, expectations, and obligations, to find one little plot of space where they can have time that is all their own. Like the runaway cow, the women I know don’t need a luxurious space, just a quiet one with guilt-free time to replenish our spirits. It could be a sewing room, the gym, or even sitting on a blanket under a tree with a good book.