Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom From Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans by Sheinelle Jones - 10

Always Mean What You Say

Alma Wahlberg, Donnie and Mark Wahlberg’s mom

As moms, when we’re proud of our family’s accomplishments, we’ll gladly tell the world. But what happens when it’s the opposite, when life gets a bit more complicated, and you’d rather keep your thoughts to yourself?

For a lot of us, that’s where journaling comes in. The origins of journal keeping date back to the tenth century and, since the coronavirus pandemic, it has exploded in popularity, worldwide. According to surveys, about half of us have written in a journal at some point in our lives and one-in-six people make it a routine practice. I get why so many folks are drawn to it. Therapists boast about its self-help benefits from boosted happiness, goal attainment, and mental clarity to stress reduction and even physical healing.

Although I’m not a journaler myself, I grew up with one. For as long as I can remember, while the rest of the house was sleeping and the moon was still high in the sky, my mom would get up, make a cup of coffee, light a candle, and then sit at our kitchen table to journal as the sun came up. Every morning, when I finally rolled out of bed, I would find her there writing, with an array of colored pens at her fingertips and one of her three million pairs of fancy reading glasses sitting on her nose. (There were reading glasses tucked in drawers all over our house, so she always had a pair handy.) Glancing over her shoulder every now and then as I passed by, I could see that Mom would often start with a Bible verse or a motivational quote. She scribbled notes in the borders of some pages and, sometimes, she’d add a picture or memento from an event. As soon as she filled one book with her beautiful cursive writing, she’d start a new one.

Outside of these few observations over the years, I didn’t give Mom’s journals, or her reasons for journaling, a single thought. Not once was I tempted to read her entries or ask about them. Perhaps I was too consumed with my own teenage life to imagine for a second that what my mother was pouring into all those pages and books might be of interest to anybody except her. Once I was grown and managing my own children, I think I accepted that her journals were just hers, not about me and not meant for me.

Then I met Alma Wahlberg, a tiny woman with a huge heart who somehow managed to raise nine children: Debbie, Michelle, Arthur, Paul, Jim, Tracey, Robert, and—the youngest and most famous two—actor-musicians Donnie and Mark. Their huge family had a hard-knock life at times, but they still managed to spin their passions and talents into gold. For years, Alma, their loving matriarch, had her hands too full to reflect on her family’s (or her own) struggles and successes in real time. But when we met, one of the first things she wanted me to know was that, once her children became adults, she had written about it all. Like my mother, Alma was an avid journaler; unlike Mom, Alma was eager to share.

Raised in Dorchester—one of Boston’s largest, toughest neighborhoods—the Wahlberg kids are what used to be called “stair steps.” Translation: Alma gave birth to nine offspring in eleven years, starting when she was eighteen. By the time she was thirty, she and her husband, Donald, were raising three daughters and six sons under the age of twelve, in tight quarters on a tighter budget—and Alma told me she loved it.

As someone who didn’t even get pregnant with my first child until I was thirty-one, I listened to her in awe of how she managed as such a young woman—especially after her marriage broke up when Mark was ten. Think about it for a second: nine kids. And she’s twenty-nine. Then she’s thirty-nine and juggling them all, along with a job, or two. Then she’s forty-five, and crowds of giddy young girls are camping outside of her house because two of her boys are teenage superstars. Her sons build upon those successes, transforming her life for the better in ways she never could have imagined back when, as Donnie once said of his mother, “She made the best of times in the worst of times.” It reads like a modern-day fairy tale, with a thick Boston accent. And like every fairy tale, the road to the happy ending was sometimes rough.

It has been well documented that Alma’s celebrity sons have experienced extreme highs and disturbing lows and that, through it all, no one believed in or championed them more. Yet even she wouldn’t have predicted the heights Donnie’s local boy band, New Kids on the Block, soared to in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The teen idols sold more than eighty million records and attracted screaming Beatlemania-like crowds of adoring young fans worldwide, making her Donnie a star. As if one famous son wasn’t odds-defying enough, Mark, after a brief stint with New Kids, led the ’90s rap group Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch to success, with big brother Donnie producing.

Things were looking up, but Mark has been honest about the fact that his early career was complicated at times by controversy. Like anyone, he had to learn and mature. Child stars are often especially challenged by this, but Mark has moved forward, thriving both personally and professionally. Married and father to four of Alma’s dozens of grandchildren, he has become one of Hollywood’s most successful producers and actors. He also partnered with Donnie and their brother Paul, a professional chef, to launch Wahlburgers, a restaurant chain that Alma helped promote on a reality TV show where her children’s devotion to her was on full display.

Standing outside of Alma’s house, I secretly think of how cool my teenage self would have thought it was that I am about to interview the mom of not one, but two of the most popular heartthrobs at my high school. Alma now had a fan base of her own. Wahlburgers , the family’s reality TV show, showcased her spunk and charm for an audience that grew to love her authenticity and maternal moxie. So, I’m not surprised when Alma opens her door, throws her arms wide and pulls me into a tight hug. What is surprising is that she’s as petite as I am, with an even smaller frame. That’s rare.

She ushers me right to her dining room table, which is piled with picture albums—the thick, old-school kind that every mom of a certain generation pulls out when company comes. At a time when so many of us keep thousands of unprinted photos on our phones, rarely taking the time to enjoy them, it’s nice to sit with these cherished images, carefully preserved in their plastic sleeves.

As she smiles longingly at each image, Alma explains what every avid Wahlberg family fan already knows—that they grew up poor but still found joy as kids; that their working-class neighborhood was the tight-knit kind where everybody looked out for each other; and that, despite having a big, rowdy brood to tend while also working as a bank clerk and a nurse’s aide, every one of Alma’s children believed they were her favorite.

As a mom of multiple kids myself, I’m always impressed when a mother figures out how to make each child feel special. Alma’s becoming that mom is even more impressive when you know her background.

“I had a horrible childhood,” she says. “I had alcoholic parents, and my father used to beat my mother. It was awful, just god-awful. My father was gone [a lot] and my mother was by herself. I hated all of it.”

She often had to fend for herself as a child, and she was often hungry. “I would open the kitchen door and look in, and if I saw pans on the stove, I knew I was going to have supper,” she recalls. “If there wasn’t pans on the stove, I knew my mother was drinkin’ and there was gonna be no supper.” Alma looks into my eyes and the pain in hers is unmistakable. “It was tough.”

She took what she could from it, even if that just meant learning what not to do as a parent. As difficult as it was at times, having her own children helped heal the void her childhood created. She loved the challenge of raising them, the satisfaction she got from their need for her, and their love.

“Most of the time probably I didn’t even know what I was doin’,” she confesses. But there was one thing she did know: “I wanted to give them the love that I always wanted and never got. And I wanted them to know I’m always there. Always.”

Alma’s eyes sparkle with joy as she reminisces about her kids’ favorite foods (English muffin pizzas and spaghetti and meatballs), her nicknames for them (like “Baby Donnie” and “Monkey” for Mark), and the thrill of watching all of them blossom. Yet she doesn’t shy away from talking about the harder times.

“If anybody [had] ever told me how they were gonna turn out, I’d say, really? You didn’t have to chase them through yards and climb fences to catch them.” She lets out a raspy laugh. “I did. It was crazy…There were times that I really hit rock bottom and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”

Her candor is a relief because, while I’m always eager to highlight the rewarding parts of motherhood, any honest heart-to-heart about parenting must also acknowledge that not every day feels like a sunny walk in the park. Case in point, the day her son Jimmy got in trouble for staying out late and was sent to his room. When Alma went upstairs to talk with him, Jimmy was gone—and the bedroom window was open. So, she got in her car and drove around until she spotted him. She jumped out quietly, crouched down behind some hedges, counted to three, “and then I grabbed him from behind—like, in a headlock!” She cracks herself up while I silently pray I never have to go driving around New York City looking for any of my children. (Actually, with cellphone tracking, I guess things are a bit different now anyway.) I’m also pretty sure that, at the time, Alma couldn’t have pictured a day when that story would make her laugh—proof that parenting is all about playing the long game.

Beyond the occasional headlock, “I always tried to mean what I said,” Alma adds. “If you don’t do this or you do that, you’re not gonna be able to do this—I stuck to those types of things, so they knew I wasn’t messin’ around.”

Alma says it was nothing short of surreal for her to sit in audiences at New Kids on the Block concerts around the world. At the height of Donnie’s and Mark’s early fame, she needed a police detail in front of her house to control the crowds of kids who would camp outside on any given night—more of a nuisance for her neighbors, perhaps, than her family. Alma, in fact, was known to take pity on them. At one point, she let some girls who had gathered outside in the rain come inside. Today, that seems like a crazy idea, but it’s quintessential Alma. Her painful childhood gave her a tender heart that endured through her divorce, times so lean she went on welfare, and the worst fate any mother can face: the loss of a child. In 2003, her firstborn, Debbie, died of a heart attack at age forty-three. Mark’s first child, Ella, was born the same day.

“You’re trying to be happy and mourn at the same time,” she tells me, quietly. “Yeah, that was tough.”

“How do you heal from that?” I ask.

“You don’t,” she says.

She consoled herself by clinging to Debbie’s memory, the good times—the milestones, weddings, babies—and the closeness of the family that remained. “Mark calls me from all over the world, every single day,” she brags. “[It’s] the one thing that I’ve always asked. ‘Call your mother,’ I said. No big deal, just, ‘Hi, Ma, how are you? I love you. I gotta go…’ That’s all I’m askin’.”

Somehow, it all worked out and Alma’s kids did more than call. In addition to Wahlburgers, her son Paul also founded the Alma Nove, a fine dining restaurant on the waterfront of Hingham, Massachusetts, named in honor of you-know-who.

“One day, I’m lookin’ out the window,” she recalls. “I’m like, ‘God, how did I ever get here? How did I go from a welfare line to here?’ It was mind-boggling. That was probably the day I became so grateful.”

I was feeling pretty grateful myself, to have met this humble, inspiring woman. But I had promised my own kids that I’d be home in time to tuck them into bed. Before I headed to the airport, Alma reminded me that she had some journal entries I had promised her she could share. As she begins to read from a stack of loose-leaf pages, I can see how important this collection of her thoughts is to her. She has kept them, preserved and close, even though she didn’t have a proper book.

“Sitting down at the table, I felt it again, the longing,” Alma read. “I lit a cigarette, looked out at the stillness and asked, ‘Please God, let them know who I am.’ People know me as being the mother of a few famous children and, although this fact has brought many gifts to my life, and had afforded me opportunities that may never have been possible otherwise, there was a whole lot more to my story than most people know.” I listen, touched by how raw and honest she is—and by her willingness to openly share.

She said she wanted to inspire me and other moms not to give up, and to love our children unconditionally. She also hoped her children would read them one day, she tells me.

I silently wondered if they would want to. I mean, I had never taken an interest in my own mom’s journals and Mom never confided her doubts or fears to me. No matter what we went through, she assured me we’d be fine, and I believed her. Did I want to see behind that curtain? Did I even want to poke it with a stick? I didn’t.

But then I began writing this book and early morning thoughts of Alma and her journals made me pick up the phone. Would you believe, like clockwork, my mom was already up and writing!

“Mom, why do you journal?” I ask, jumping right into this place we have never gone before.

“Sometimes I can’t sleep,” she answers, not missing a beat. “It might be four or four-thirty in the morning and things would be in my head. Like our family stuff. When I write it, it helps to relieve it, and take it away and put it in perspective. Whereas if I don’t write, I carry it with me all day.”

I had never given a thought to my mom’s need for relief or perspective in order to get through her day. Now I’ve lived long enough to understand how your brain can spin out in the wee hours when life starts lifin ’, as they say. What did Oprah call these? Lightbulb moments? For me, this was a big one. I suddenly saw my mom in a way that I just hadn’t considered before. I always knew she leaned on her faith to get her through challenging times and, as a teacher, she always enjoyed reading and writing. But I never once thought of her daily journaling as part of a self-care ritual or a process of healing and making sense of her ever-changing life.

“There are scriptures, and words, and little sayings,” Mom continues, as I remember some of the pages I saw only in passing. “Every now and again I’ll go back and look at them.”

“Would you ever want me to read them?” I ask, unsure of what I want her answer to be.

“No,” she says. “Sometimes it’s surface stuff, but other times it’s deep and very personal. I have shared some things with you, but—no.” She pauses before adding, “What got me through raising you guys was my faith and the meditations I had in my journals. They sustained me through it all. Journaling is a part of me. I get joy from it.”

Alma Wahlberg died a few years after our conversation. I was heartbroken to learn that it was due to complications from dementia. She was seventy-eight. I thought about the pieces of her journals that stayed with me: “I’ve lived with alcoholism and abuse, struggled with poverty, and experienced great wealth,” she had shared. “Lost so many that I loved, struggled to raise nine kids that I loved more than anything else. Watched them suffer, learn, and come out on the other side. I lost myself, found myself again and again. I kept moving forward no matter what. This is my story. The story of how I got from there, to here.” It was important to her to reveal these things; I wonder if her kids and grandchildren have read them, as she hoped.

As moms, we often shield our children from our real feelings and failures, even though the secrets we keep often keep us from revealing our truest selves. And there’s so much “mom-shaming” these days, particularly on social media, I think it prevents some of us from being honest about ourselves—even with ourselves. Alma wanted her kids to know all of who she was and what she went through. She trusted that revealing her messy parts wouldn’t make them think less of her, it would only make them love, respect, and appreciate her more.

Meeting Alma made me start to think about the value of sharing more of myself with my children as they mature—especially the parts of me that don’t appear on TV, or at meetings with their teachers, or even around our family table. In other words, more of my truth—and mess. Asking my mom about why she journaled made me think it might be time to turn the magnifying glass toward myself. But how much of us and our stories do our children need to know? How intentional should we be about sharing them? And when? I think these are deeply personal choices with no one right answer. But I believe the questions are worth asking, and probably revisiting over time. After all, Alma wanted her adult children to know everything—but was that what she wanted when she was my age?

Because I’m on television every day and was even before my children were born, there’s plenty for them to explore. But, like me with my mom’s journals, I’m not sure they’re all that interested. They do think it’s funny to say: “Okay, Google, tell us about Sheinelle Jones.” And they get tickled when the robotic “Google voice” gets to the point where she butchers the pronunciation of their names. Maybe it’s just too soon.

A few years ago, my grandmother started gifting me what archivists might call her papers. Born in St. Louis in 1929— not an easy time or place, especially for a Black woman—Grandmama has always been a giant and an anchor in my life but, in our hometown of Wichita, where she was the first African American woman on the school board, she’s also a known trailblazer. So, to have this treasure trove of her countless speeches, photos from her high school years (including one with her first “crush”), and the story of how she met my grandfather, along with a picture of them on a date when she was in college, is no small thing. She also wrote a detailed family history that includes records and recollections dating back to her own grandparents. More than one hundred pages long and mind-blowingly impressive, she gifted a copy to each of her grandchildren. I love imagining my children’s children reading this book one day. And I expect, now that she’s reached past ninety-five, she thinks of that too.

Like my grandmother, I’m pretty sure Alma didn’t have a moment to put pen to paper back when she was my age and still in the thick of raising her children and creating herself. So, I’m going to take a pass. Ask me again in ten or twenty years. Maybe, by then, I’ll be up for journaling not just because it’s therapeutic, but because there’s so much power in passing on our stories, in all their glory, truth and messiness, especially to those we love.

One thing I learned from my mom: As long as you communicate, whether with your wife or your kids, you can get through anything.

—Al Roker, cohost, The Today Show