Month: May 2020

Day55 Mother’s Day

Posted on May 10, 2020 Updated on May 10, 2020

I’m crazy about my own mom and grateful to her for a zillion or so things, but today I feel like sharing what I like about being a mom. And it’s Mother’s Day, so that means I get to do what I want.

When I was a working mom with young kids, sometimes people would say things to me like

Don’t you just LOOOOOVVVVEEE being a mom?

And I would say, “Yes, but it’s really hard.” I regularly felt the need to temper any kind of romanticized or idealistic notion of motherhood with this reminder. Let’s not act like motherhood is only watching little people act in adorable ways and cuddle and so forth. That part is definitely amazing, but motherhood for me also involved often having too many responsibilities and not knowing how to manage them all, and dropping my son off at a daycare where he screamed and held out his arms to me as I left for work, and negotiating ridiculous conflicts my children had daily over who got to open a door or push an elevator button, and resorting to yelling sometimes when the kids weren’t listening, and regularly being overtired or irritable or frustrated or whatever.

All that said, one of the favorite parts of my life was when the kids were small and every day involved reading stories, singing songs, and lots and lots of playing of all sorts—trains and cars and dolls and pretend and catch and hockey and baseball and board games. I loved it.

I also appreciate how many ways I learned who I was and what I valued as I mothered. I became good at certain things I had no reason to learn otherwise. For example, I’m really good at finding lost things. For some reason it drives my kids crazy when I insist that we go through these approaches, but it almost always works to

Figure out where you last remember seeing the lost item
Retrace your steps
Check every conceivable spot where the lost item could be, even if everyone is certain that it’s not in that spot or that they already checked there

I’m also patient about untying knots in laces or necklaces and fixing the little screws in glasses.

I learned that I believe in song as a way to soothe. I believe we should share and take turns and communicate explicitly about our wants and needs. I believe it’s okay to set boundaries on what we share; with my kids, it was a favorite stuffed animal for each of them that they had permanent dibs on.

I learned that hunger and tiredness affect my ability to cope with life just like it affects my kids.

I figured out boundaries and discipline. My kids know that the non-negotiable rules for me are the ones connected to safety, kindness, and character. I hope they also learned that we all make mistakes. The important thing is what we do after we mess up. I hope I’ve taught them that one.

I learned that I love to play and tell stories and listen to little ones and watch them grow and learn and laugh.

I experienced how important cuddling time is for all of us.

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At this point, my kids are aged 20 and 17, and we are all dealing (or not dealing) with the grief and pain that comes in the time after divorce. My daughter Callie is in college. My son Jace is finishing his junior year of high school and lives with his retired dad. Jace and I get together as much as we can—it was usually twice a week in the pre-pandemic months. But I have to work full-time to support myself and my kids, so right now I have a good job I love, but work is 2 1/2 hours from where my apartment is because I chose to rent a place near Jace (and also near a good support network, but that’s for another post).

These days, it seems obvious that motherhood is hard. Post-divorce fall-out for me, and pandemic for all of us.

I still wonder if I’ve failed the kids by choosing divorce. Is that always a part of being a mom, kinda like being a teacher—seeing both what we did well and what we might’ve done better? Their dad is a good man, and he was a good man when we were married. But our relationship was not healthy, and I spent years distracting myself from looking at it. Maybe my kids will learn about healthy relationships from this. Or maybe they won’t. This whole situation is in the grey area of parenting. I’m muddling through.

So the current hard part of being a mom for me is worrying about the ways I’ve been a poor role model for my kids. And then I think, If I’m too hard on myself, then they might think that’s how we should be. It’s a lot of pressure, being a role model, but it’s also a reminder of our values. If I’m gentle with myself as I continue to learn and grow, maybe my kids will learn to be gentle with themselves, too.

So, yeah, it’s hard being a mom right now, but it is still something I appreciate more than ever.

Part of not living with my kids very much in the last 10 months has been realizing how much I love them and how grateful I am to be a mom to them. The silver lining of the pandemic for me is that I can work remotely from my kitchen, and my kids are taking turns staying with me and with their dad, so I get to spend real time with them again. Not just visits or going out to dinner, but the kind of time that you get when sharing a household.

The truth is, both Callie and Jace have their lives that don’t involve me. Callie, especially, craves a return to a life of living with people her age; she wants to travel and learn and be ready to launch into the next phase of her life when college is over. Jace has a year of high school left, but he is like most teens in that he spends plenty of time away from me. That is as it should be. They are growing up.

So it’s not that they stay in my apartment and we do some deep bonding every moment. It’s more that when we interact, we might enjoy a meal or a tv show or an activity together (I set up Wii; I am still horrible at MarioKart, and they are both still pros); I get to see how cool they are as they figure out their linguistics work or analyze the cinematography in a movie; we laugh together or share angst or vent to one another when small things go awry; we have minor and major conflicts, and we resolve them. I appreciate all of this in a new way. My eyes are a bit more open because of the months I’ve had of deeply missing these wonderful human beings.

I think the pressure to be a “good” mom makes mothering less enjoyable. But when I think of mothering as an opportunity to grow while helping a couple other human beings grow, it’s easy to love it.

Now that my kids are no longer toddlers, people don’t really ask me,