True Confessions

I freely admit that as soon as someone mentions Mother's Day, my heart sinks a little.  This is the one day when all that I have stuffed in my 'Being a Mother' drawer  comes flying out and gets dumped on the floor.  The whole day (and days leading up to it) becomes a series of self-examination and self-recrimination.  "Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda" piles are everywhere.  The pastor trots out Proverbs 31 and holds up the mirror of that impossible standard to me, and I stare at my reflection, knowing that I fall so terribly short of all that is good and beautiful in a mother. The worst verse is 28. "Her children arise and call her blessed".  What mother doesn't want that?  But also, what mother doesn't know that in the meantime, her children call her a lot more things than blessed.  And not always in a good way.

When I dreamt about being a mother, I saw myself as a calm, cool guide who would steer her children through life, all the while floating above trivialities. Once they reached the age of two and half, there would be no need to worry about them, for by that time, they would be well-trained children, who knew how to behave, how to give a proper hand shake and good eye contact to people, and as an added bonus, their beds would be made every day.

Where I got this load of nonsense is a mystery. I may have read one too many "Little Women" stories, where the mother is firm but loving; and she is certainly never nonplussed. I should have read more books about mothers where the motto was :"Life is messy; clean it up", because  that's what I have been doing for twenty years. Cleaning up a messy life. Not always successfully.

I didn't realize that a mother is first of all a person.  She is person with little to no experience,  who is trying to navigate the waters of motherhood using a manual with missing pages.  Nor did I realize that each child needs a different manual [also with pages missing]; and that even if there was a definitive answer for every dilemma a mother faces, by the time she applies the formula, the problem changes to something different, or more tricky.

No one but a mother knows the incredible amount of time she spends, silently apologizing to her children for the many things she passes onto them that they will never be able to live down.  A child doesn't just hear their mother in themselves.  A mother hears herself in her children.  And sometimes that is just painful.  She hears a certain tone, a certain phrase, sees a certain mannerism, and thinks "That's terrible.  Where did they get that from?" ; and then the awful realization comes to her, that her children a simply mirroring what they see in her.

So when Mother's Day is rolled out, I take a deep breath.  And I hold it, until Mother's Day is over.  Then I shove all the 'Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda's'  back in the drawer, along with the notes of apology to the unsuspecting children.  I put the "I'll try harder this year" note at the top of the pile, so that if the drawer opens unexpectedly, they will know that my intentions have always been good, even if my actions haven't followed through.