Mother's Day

Every year when the commercials start coming out "Here's what Mom wants!" I have a complicated anti-reaction to it.  I was going to blog about it but a) I don't blog anymore and b) I already have, at least twice, and the writer in me likes to whine about not doing the same thing AGAIN and the internal editor likes to point out that I did it MUCH BETTER last time so this morning I went and found those two blog posts in my (incomplete digital) archives and here they are, for your reviewing pleasure.

From May 12, 2013:

Mother's Day.

I used to cry in church, every Mother's Day, because I wanted children so badly, and I was barren.  And then I would look around me and think everyone knew why I was crying, and I would cry harder.  (Why on earth I forced myself to go to church on Mother's Day, I will never know.  God wouldn't have minded.  I know that now.)

Several years ago, when my own invisible, unknown-even-to-me demons were making my parenting hard on everyone in my household, I found myself approaching Mother's Day with an astonishing measure of self-pity.  When I caught myself thinking "well they probably won't get me anything anyway", I was finally appalled enough at myself to snap out of it.  Since that year, this is what Mother's Day has meant to me:

Today is the day that I say "Thank you, God, that I get to be a mother, after all."  I hope I cry in church today, out of gratitude for these two incredible fascinating funny smart athletic interesting people that live in our house with us.  They're tall and lean and brown and fit and they have great hair and both of them have great senses of humour, in very different ways.  They are both capable of great kindness, and I love being with them.

Today, especially this year, is also the day that I celebrate the fact that my own mother is still "this side of heaven."  I will say this, too, because she would say it as well, that she is mothering me more at this stage in my life, while I am enduring an absolute storm of recall of repressed memories of severe, sustained abuse, than she ever has.  As horrible as the stories I have to tell are, and as heartbreaking as they must be to her, because the perpetrators of my worst abuses were not unknown to her, she has never once doubted me, never once faltered in her absolute resolve to be strong for me.

The gift I want today, on top of those? as if a person should need any more than that?

A picture of three of them together, these extravagant graces in my life, a memento to mark this moment in time. 

And from May 15, 2018:

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I say Mother's Day has been a problematic day for me.  Likely when I was younger and mostly did As Expected (beyond one cranky day in grade five where I got tired of always being called a brain and the teacher said "remember to pay attention to the ..(I forget what letter).." before she gave us a spelling test, and so I deliberately spelled them all wrong ...) I bought the requisite gifts and cards and there may even have been breakfasts served in bed.

And then I got older and moved away and got married and started to realize that all those complicated conflicting feelings I had about my mother were actually justified and also not my fault, and I went through the motions without actually meaning much of it.

And then we started trying to conceive, and there were at least a dozen years where being in church on Mother's Day was pure torture.  And then the children came along and for a few years, when they were tiny and compliant, Mother's Day was deeply satisfying.  And then they got older and I wasn't being the magical sort of infinitely patient mother I had fully planned to be and things weren't looking a lot like the imagined life I had planned and then more things and other things and about five years ago, as I was feeling slighted on Mother's Day, I realized I didn't ever want another day like that.  And I changed my perspective, and I remembered all those years I'd cried in church on Mother's Day because I wanted a CHILD, ANY CHILD.  I also remembered how far short of my personal goals my own performance as a mother had turned out to be, and I cut my mother some slack. (It helps that my mother, who used to lose her temper on an hourly basis, somehow (God) became a woman who has almost completely lost her ability to lose her temper.)

I decided that Mother's Day was going to be my own personal thanksgiving day - Thank you God for these amazing kids.  Thank you God that despite all kinds of trauma, (mine, hers, known, unknown), my mother and I have a relationship that is even often satisfying to both of us.

This year I've added a realization.  My mother was in the hospital, and she was very very ill and the doctor was of the experienced opinion that she would die, and then she started to get better.  And as she got better but still not that great, she got petulant and mouthy and I was the brunt of most of it.  And when I say most of it, it was only three incidences in eight days, but it wounded me deeply and it took me a week of doing nothing but knitting and Netflix to get over the emotional shell shock.

But I realized that I still love her.  I grew up terrified of her and I still love her.  She is so much more at peace than she ever was when I was growing up, and things are SO different now that loving her is a lot easier - she's kind of sassy and funny and I don't have to tiptoe, much, but that's actually beside the point.

The point is I love her because she raised me.  There's a lot of us out there with similar upbringings, and some of us have relationshoips with our mothers and some of us don't, but I want to say this, to MOTHERS -

This is a relationship where we need to be intentional, because we occupy the spot labelled "mother" in someone else's life.  What fills that spot is something your child will carry with them their entire lives, and it will forever inform who they are.

Can we please be careful with our babies, our toddlers, our teens, our adult kids?  Can we make what occupies that spot fragrant and not frustrating?  (As our children age, I think we need to be intentional about listening more than we talk but that's likely another whole blog post.)

I want there to be a better summing-up sentence than this but it's all I have.

***