I remember my first Mother's Day. I don't remember what we
did as a young family with a five-month-old baby, but I remember how I felt:
Dumbfounded panic. For my entire life, Mother's Day was something we celebrated
for someone else. My sister and I would give my mom handmade goodies, which
slowly matured into store-bought ones, which slowly matured into adult
excursions to the day spa or brunches at the local teahouse.
Now, it was my turn to have someone celebrate me. The idea felt
beyond strange. How could I be celebrated for a job I was totally screwing up?
It had taken me months to wrap my head around the fact that I indeed was a mom,
and even five months after birth, I still needed processing time. The idea that
I had a whole life in my hands terrified me. It seemed all too easy to mess it
up. As a mom of "advanced maternal age" (the author of that phrase
can suck it, by the way), I figured I'd be so chock-full of wisdom, doubts
about my maternal skills would not cross my mind. How wrong I was. In fact, I
think doubt about my ability to parent was more acute, louder even, just
because of my age. I had more time to see mistakes others made, watch the
success of others and compare myself to it all.
And as any mother can tell you, unfair comparison is the
death of sanity.
Too often, women put forth the faces they want everyone else
to see. What may have been a private hell on Earth for some mother becomes
glossed over in the retelling. Think about people who claim their children
slept through the night for 16 hours from birth, or the ones who swear that
labor feels good, or that breastfeeding is easy, or that their toddlers love
broccoli. Our gut knows this is just not the truth. It's impossible! But our
minds start feeding us slivers of doubt. "If her kids sleep so well, I
must be doing something wrong….if nursing is that easy, what mistakes am I
making?" The internal dialog is endless, but with one common theme: We're
screwing it up.
I thought I'd mastered the art of not comparing my insides
to others' outsides. I was, until I gave birth. Then everything I seemed to
have accomplished in my thirties got stashed in my Diaper Genie along with the
poopy diapers. The holes left there by my former knowledge quickly filled in,
like wet sand at the shoreline. Instead of confidence, doubt and self-loathing
took their places. A friend of mine assured me it takes a lot of work to screw
up a kid; it's not something an hour of television a day or the occasional
missed nap is going to do. No mom is perfect, she assured me.
But all moms do one thing perfectly: We all face this doubt
and this overwhelming sense of being responsible. Perfectly.
This all made me look at my mom in a totally different way.
"Textbook" is not how you might describe our history. In fact, my mom
is fond of saying "God put parents here to teach our children what
mistakes not to make." It angered me, that saying. Because it made it
sound like every parenting step my mother made was a grand mistake, everything
I'm destined to do will be a huge lesson in what not to do for my kids. Is that
right?
No.
All grown up now, I can look back and see things my mom did
right. I can see things she does right as a parent now. I can also look back
and know she felt the exact same doubts I felt as a new mom. And she overcame
them. Or at least pushed them aside so she could parent my sister and I.
Yes, there are definitely many aspects of my childhood I
won't repeat. Yet there are some I definitely will.
Such as being my kid's cheerleader. Let's be honest: I could
not master anything athletic. Or even physical. Too uncoordinated for dance,
too scrawny for softball, too short for basketball, too just awful for tennis.
I tried. And Mom schlepped me from one practice to another, until I called it
quits. She never offered much of an opinion one way or the other. She let me
figure out what I was doing. But what she did do was help me see what I could
do very well. And that was write. She knew my sister received accolades by the
bucket for her athletic prowess, while I got the "Thanks for
Participating" ribbons. But what I could do was spin tales about eggs
entering another world through a magical door in the refrigerator's produce
drawer, or make the contents of a kitchen pantry sound nearly literary. I spent
weeks one summer writing a book about my stuffed teddy bear Sunny, and even
longer than that polishing the details in my detective series.
And Mom held those accomplishments up to the light for me to
see. I may strike out at bat, but I could make people laugh with my comic
renditions of a Mars Bar living in the fridge. I learned to see that all of us
have some unique talent, and it's up to us to blow it off or feed it so it
flourishes.
So this Mother's Day, years since my first one, I have
gotten better with the mom doubt. I've learned that motherhood isn't about
being perfect, nor is it as fragile as a blown-glass ornament hanging on the
Christmas tree. And I understand what my mom says, too. We are here to teach
our kids, bad and good. There are things in my life I hope my kids never need
to deal with. I hope they learn from my missteps and mistakes. Don't we all
want better lives for our kids than the ones we're living now?
But I don't think we as moms serve only as examples of what
to avoid, of things not to do. Even in the most difficult relationships, there
are rays of good that children learn from as well. My mom taught me that we all
have something special. That is something I will reinforce with my own
children. Mom taught me other things, too, which I will pass down in one form
or another.
And the biggest one is this: No matter what, love survives. Nothing we do is stronger than the bond
between a mother and a child. In all the craziness that this world can flood us
with, that bond serves as a solid foundation, never wavering and always
visible, even in the worst of storms. Even withstanding maternal mistakes. This
mother/child bond can give you strength to accomplish amazing things that would
have been impossible had you only leaned upon yourself. It makes both mothers
and children stronger, better, bigger. The umbilical cord is cut at birth, but
it never goes away. Mothers and children are forever tethered together, not by
any physical link, but by love. Love is our umbilical cord, and it sustains us,
forces us go on when we can't take another step, allows us to do impossible
feats. It gives us life, just like the original cord did in the womb.
So Mom, on this Mother's Day, since you didn't want me to
buy you anything, I am giving you a gift that I didn't purchase. I'm doing what
you encouraged in me from the start: I am writing. Words are what I can do, and
what have saved me time and time again. That's a gift you helped me see. So
even though, all these years and years and years after your first Mother's Day,
you still feel the doubt of your own parenting skills, know that you gave me
some good armor and good tools to carve a place for myself in this world. Best
of all, you gave me love, and that gives me more strength than you know. Happy
Mother's Day.
