morning on Mother’s Day

Posted on May 14, 2023

My young adult kids are still in bed, and I’m thinking about being a mom.

I’m thinking about how I don’t really fully know the things I’ve done well and the things I’ve done poorly as a mom because it’s confusing—it’s tough to know how much to give and support and accept our kids’ needs and desires and how much to have boundaries so they learn to make decisions and recover from mistakes and respect that others have needs, too.

And I’m thinking about how I still want to teach my kids things and direct them, but my role now is more in the realm of gentle mentorship when they ask for my advice; and maybe sharing with them some of my own ongoing growth so they can see that at any given moment I may be a good role model in some ways but a very very imperfect role model in other ways; and also occasionally addressing things in our relationship when I’d like things to be different.

And I’m thinking about how grateful I am to be a mom even on the hardest days. Or especially on the hardest days. It’s difficult to explain, this part. But the way I love Callie and Jace is something I hope they feel on some level, even when my flawed human self doesn’t communicate that love very well. And I hope every person feels that kind of love, not necessarily from me, but from someone. Because I think knowing that we are fully lovable even when we are behaving in terrible ways helps us to be okay—to recover from our worst moments, to accept that we have been sucky and will likely be sucky again, and to be forgiving with ourselves and also with others.

Pretty much all of the above is about me and my feelings, and I’m okay with that because it’s Mother’s Day, after all. But I also want to say two other things.

I remember my own mom reaching out to me on Mother’s Day once I became a mom. I don’t think she and I ever had a conversation about what it means to be a mom. But I can’t help but wonder if these were the kinds of things in her heart, too.

My mom would sometimes drive me crazy with her empathy for people who messed up. It seemed to me that she was so busy feeling bad for people who had done terrible things that she didn’t think about accountability, and, worse, she didn’t seem to spend much time celebrating people who made good choices, day after day. I used to half joke that Tonya Harding was one of my mom’s personal heroes because my mom talked so much about Tonya Harding’s difficult childhood, way way before that I, Tonya movie came out, at the time when Harding was widely viewed as a rather vicious person.

But now I wonder if my mom was focused on the stuff that mothering has helped me to better understand. That it’s easy to love my kids because they are smart and wise and funny and hard working and have hearts that are big and generous. And it seems like it would be harder to love my kids who snap at me and leave dirty dishes in the living room and sometimes make poor choices that have negative effects on themselves or others. But it’s not hard to love my kids in the midst of their imperfect moments. Sure, it can be hard to appropriately deal with imperfect moments. But the love, well, that’s not hard.

I think my mom, with her six kids, was well-practiced at seeing people’s actions in the context of them doing the best they could in any given moment. And when she reached out to me when I became a new mom, maybe she knew I would grow in that practice, too. All this is complete projection because we didn’t have this conversation, but it’s something I wonder. It’s like my mom lived that loving-kindness meditation without ever actually saying the words. It’s like she saw people in general as worthy of love the way her own kids were (and are) worthy of love.

So that part was about my mom. And now this part is about my kids. Callie and Jace are amazing people. Yesterday we ate and grocery shopped and cooked and watched tv and played an inappropriate game. We laughed and laughed and laughed. Their significant others were with us, and they are lovely people, too. That’s all I wanted to say. I’m so proud of my kids, and I’m so lucky to be their mom.

I hear them stirring upstairs. Happy Mother’s Day to me.