Mother's Day, Better Late Than Never

I know, Mother’s Day is late.  It had to be.  I’m really struggling right now with mother issues.  From both my own mother and in being a mother.  The first two pieces I wrote, I trashed.  They were probably fine, but they didn’t feel right, they didn’t feel honest.  They felt like I was writing something so I would have something to post.  A writer should never be caged to perform; it does not lead to truth. 

When you don’t know where to start, sometimes not even the beginning works.  Since I can’t find the beginning, I’ll start where I know best; my heart.  Being a mother is hard.  Recently, one of my children told me I didn’t raise her.  There is of course a story behind that, one I may tell one day, but it cut me beyond pain.  It cut me not because it is true, it isn’t.  It cut me because it is HER truth.  It is what she believes because she doesn’t know the backstory of her own life, nor does she want to.  I can’t talk to her about what she doesn’t want to face.  She doesn’t know the sacrifices I made in my life to ensure she had one.  I’m not talking about the normal things a parent should do for their children.  She was a child who had great challenges and required me to be a stronger person than I ever dreamed I could be.  Because of her unique challenges, I fought battles with Children’s Services, the public school systems and the legal systems.  I bore the brunt of humiliation and judgment because I knew in my heart the interventions they were proposing would not help her to succeed, but would cripple her for the rest of her life.  That’s what I wanted for her, to have a life.  In that respect I succeeded.  In her view of what a mother is and what a mother should be, I failed.  For someone whose greatest desire was to be a good mother, it feels like an epic failure. 

The entire time I raised the daughter I didn’t, my soul was in constant chaos and confusion.  I really spent time with Spirit to help me through it.  Spirit guided me through the hardest decisions I had to make as a parent.  When I sought help from the professionals; educated people who were in theory supposed to help be the mother my daughter deserved, some of the things they suggested helped.  My daughter’s challenges were so great, they had never seen anything like it, and children like my daughter were not known or talked about.  It is barely a conversation now.  Many of the things they suggested were met with my trademark “OH, HELL NO!”  I was labeled among many less flattering things, uncooperative.  In my heart, I knew what they were proposing would damage the adult I knew she was capable of becoming.  It was a horrible time for me to live because after all, what did I know?  I had no example of parenting to follow.  I raised my girls from my heart.  I tortured myself with grief and guilt on a daily basis, desperate for any sign I was doing the right thing.  I wouldn’t have the results until she became an adult herself.  That’s a long to too wait until you find out what mistakes you made, and by that time the damage is done.  If you are lucky, your children love you anyway.  If you are really lucky, they forgive you. 

Time passed and my daughter became an adult.  I never stopped fighting the battles with her, for her.  She is someone any mother can be proud of, especially given what we faced in her life.  She is not perfect, but often you can tell the path of a person by what is surrounding their life, what their life consists of.  My daughter did not follow the path they professionals warned me about.  I like to think it was because I didn’t follow their advice and instead demanded we do better by this child.  I’m sure their opinion would be my daughter succeeded in spite of me and not because of me.  Mothers are judged more harshly than any other area.  I never thought anyone would tell me I didn’t raise this child, or any of my children, but she did.  It is her truth.  I cannot fault her for it, but I cannot deny the pain it has caused me.  She is not a cruel person, it was not her intent to cause me such pain, yet I don’t know why she would say something like this to me. 

Another blow to my parenting was when another daughter recently unfriended me on Facebook.  This overture was not so much an attack on my parenting as it was on her acceptance of who I am.  The lines are very blurry there; who I am is a mother.  It is one of the most important parts of who I am.  She has met every hope and dream I ever had for her except one.  In her efforts not to be me, she has turned in judgment of me.  Another way I have raised my children was by allowing my life to be known to them.  Not in intimate detail, nor in a way that was not age appropriate, but so that they would not live my life.  I love the person I am now, I love my life and where I am at in it, but I had a very painful journey to get here.  I did not want my children to suffer as I had.  I wanted the sun, the stars and the moon for them.  I wanted their life to be about happiness, not pain.  So I used my life as an example of what they needed to do and what they needed to achieve in order to avoid the circumstances of mine.  It worked so well they think the circumstances of my life is what defines me.  The events that have led me to this point in my life are just that, events.  They are not who I am.  No daughter wants to grow up to be her mother, I get that, but as we all know, we do.  If we are lucky, we have chosen which parts of our mother to be, and we have taken only the best parts of her.  I know I took the best parts of my mother, and spent years discarding the rest. 

My daughter is educated, a doctor.  It seemed like before she achieved this, she accepted who I am, though I am admittedly very different from anyone else.  Growing up, she forewarned her friends about me.  I have been called eccentric, unique and many other artistic terms.  I know I don’t see the world like anyone else.  I know I don’t meet the norms and expectations of what a woman my age and place in life should be.  I never have.  This daughter was always the one that seemed to accept this about me and love me anyway.  Now that she is a doctor and meeting the norms and expectations of the world she is creating for herself, it would seem I no longer meet her approval, nor do I deserve public acknowledgement I am her mother.  In this case, I posted a status update on Facebook that did not meet with her approval, and she unfriended me for it.  It was a joke, one of my flip comments.  That seems very trivial for all the things she could have said about me, but I guess for her it was the last piece of acceptance she had for me.  It hurt me deeply.  It feels as if I am no longer good enough for her, and now she doesn’t want to bother warning her friends about me.  She doesn’t want her friends to know me at all.  Facebook has become an important connection of staying and relating to my children’s lives, especially since I don’t live near them anymore.  Since she unfriended me, I don’t know what is going on in her life and I don’t have access to the pictures she takes. 

My last daughter is ironically the one who is currently closest to me.  I say ironically because the last few years with her have been difficult at best.  They say teen girls experience growing pains as they wrestle with separating their identity from their mother.  I would beg to differ.  Any mother who has not thought of killing her teen daughter and burying her in the back yard at some point is not being honest.  Those years are just as painful for the mother trying to raise them.  This beautiful baby girl we adored has turned evil and we are committed to loving her anyway.  We do, because that’s what mother’s do.  We love our children despite what condemnations come from their childish and emerging adult mouths.  It may be growing pains for them, but it’s a Xanax moment for me.  I fought ferocious battles with this daughter because more than my other two daughters, she knew more than I did.  My other two daughters of course were far wiser than myself, but they did not challenge me on it on the same level as this one did.  This one was going to prove my ignorance beyond a shadow of a doubt.  She failed, and she knows that now.  Where she used to treat me with contempt, disregard and disrespect, she now acknowledges I was on her side the whole time.  She is able to see the things I made her share with me were an effort to expand her world, not to torture it. 

I appreciate the growth she has made in the last couple of years.  She has made me proud.  She is becoming her own woman and embracing some of the lessons I tried to impart upon her when she was too stubborn to accept them.  She was listening when I didn’t think she was.  Not long ago, there was an article in the local news about a man who had tried to steal money from a Girl Scout booth.  The children took off after the man.  They were heralded as heroes for not allowing this man to steal their money; however it could have turned out very differently.  My daughter posted the article on my wall and said “Mom, I remember one time you told me there’s a difference between standing up for yourself and being stupid.  This was stupid.”  I don’t know of a greater compliment a daughter can give to her mother than letting her know she heard something she said, and believed it to be good advice.  I can’t say it made the teen years’ worth the grief, but it’s a great start.  Right now, I am hanging on to this daughter because I don’t know how to proceed with the other two. 

I have entered into a different dimension with my daughters, one in which I was not prepared for.  I was never prepared to be a mother, nor was I prepared to meet the challenges I faced as their mother, but this is harder.  I thought being a mother was supposed to be easier as I was released from the responsibility of their care, but it is not.  I have to relate to them as the adult women they are, as the adult women I raised them to be.  That includes being hurt by them and not being able to send them to their rooms.  I don’t know how to respond to being told I didn’t raise one daughter.  I don’t know how to respond being unfriended by the daughter who was historically the one I always knew was on my side.  I am still talking with them, but it is guarded.  I have retreated away from these two daughters.  As much as I want to be in their lives, I don’t know how to deal with this.  I’ll work it out; I always do because in the end there are no more important people in my world than these girls.  There are and always have been the beginning, middle and end of my life.  They live in the center of it, the sides and in every breath I take.  They are my heart and soul. 

This is where I miss and need my own mother and I don’t have one.  I have been very quiet about my mother since last fall, I wanted to see how the relationship would unfold and really there hasn’t been anything to report.  She is still peeking out of the door.  She told me she wouldn’t live through the winter; she did and is doing well.  There has been no heartache and no great joy either.  We talk on a very superficial level, and she is still the woman I remembered her to be.  But I want a mother right now.  I want a mother to tell me what her struggles were like, what she found worked in having the relationship with me she wanted.  I need someone to tell me how to move forward to have the relationship with my daughters I desire, and for them to have the relationship with me they deserve.  I don’t have that.  I never did have a mother who could help guide me through the complexities of life.  I am glad I made the effort with my mother.  I expected both an all or nothing result and what I got was neutral.  I think neutral was the best result, though it was one I had not considered.  In the spectrum of what my life is and what it has been, neutral is very boring.  I’ll take it. 

I really dread Mother’s Day.  It is a day I reflect on the mother I was and am.  It is a day I grieve for the mother I never had and a day I reject the hypocrisies surrounding it.  I experience the joy of the day when my children put forth the effort to make it a special day for me.  Most of the time, they succeed.  They do not deserve to have my world view tarnish what this day means for them.  I have never told them how I truly feel about the day and I never will.  I have never told them how much stress this day brings because there have been Mother’s Days that they have disappointed me to a great degree.  They forget to send a card because they were too busy, despite how I have told them how much a card means to me.  They will call and wish me Happy Mother’s Day and think that is enough.  Yeah, a fifteen minute call from the child I dedicated my life to is thanks enough on the one day set aside to honor the mere fact I am their mother.  They do not have to spend a lot of money, but a little time with me would be priceless.  One year, one of my daughters was angry with me so she didn’t acknowledge me at all.  Mother’s Day has also been used as a form of punishment to punish the mother who did not meet the expectation of her child.  Every year it is fraught with anxiety, not anticipation.  I feel like I’ve been on Santa’s list and I don’t know if I’ve been naughty or nice.  On the years that I have been nice, it is a glorious day.  As for the years I have been naughty, well, I spend all or part of it crying. 

This is not the warm fuzzy piece a Mother’s Day entry should be, so I suppose it is a good thing I am not on time with it.  I trashed the other pieces I wrote because they were the warm fuzzy writing one would expect to honor this day.  The problem with them was that they were superficial, they were not real.  I struggle with being a mother.  I struggle with being a daughter.  That is real.  I love my children beyond reason and because I do, they will cause me heartache.  Though they don’t always show me in a way I can receive, I know they love me, too.  The fact they are in my life brings me joy and meaning into my existence, and the pain they also bring?  I think it’s part of the package deal I signed on for.  Now someone tell me what to do with it.