Reflections on Motherhood

To those who are mothers: Happy Mother's Day. I hope this has been more than a Hallmark-created holiday for you (!).

Today was a lovely day for me. I got the kids up and gently reminded them that they wanted to wake me up with their preschool and kindergarted creations so I walked them out to the dining room, reached up to the shelf where I had placed them out of the way, gave the decorated paper bags to the monitos and then rushed back to bed and pretended that I was asleep. They shook me "awake" yelling "HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY MOMMY" and La Princesita handed me hers while The Young Prince took to unwrapping his own to give me that which was inside.

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One Mother's Day, when I was a junior in high school, I had planned to give my mother a copy of the oratory speech I had done eulogizing mothers and the role they have played, historically and currently, in family life. It got personal as well, this speech of 10 minutes, and I brought home trophy after trophy with it. My coach had expected me to take it to nationals but, alas, the State judges didn't think as kindly and I lost at finals. However, I had bought an "Anything Book"...basically a blank book with lined paper and a fabric cover...and written the entire speech, in calligraphy, and was planning to give it to my mother for Mother's Day. I ended up throwing it at her when we had a huge fight as to my reasons for wanting to attend the last day of the speech tournament in which I had already lost placement--I genuinely wanted to see the others and lend moral support to my teammates. My mother thought that I must want to go for some other reason; namely, a BOY.

This was the topic of a great deal of problems in my adolescent relationship with my mother. I was accused of having illicit relationships with my teachers just because I was an excellent student who my teachers happened to love--probably because I was one of the few who actually truly respected my teachers. My biology teacher, rest his soul, an older gentleman who requested I be his 4th period aide my freshman year--his daughter had even babysat me when I was a child, we even went to the same church. Yeah, I was "doing something" I shouldn't be since he gave me a hug as a sign of peace during Easter Mass that year. Right in front of my parents, mind you. At that point, I was really too naive to understand what my mother was getting at (I was quite a late bloomer...).

Accused of something of the same thing with my orchestral conductor when he hugged me in the PDX airport and thanked me for all my hard work after two hard weeks of my leading the orchestra in Japan after I graduated from high school (again, an embrace that occurred right in front of my parents)--I had done something inappropriate, evidently, to encourage that kind of response. In reality, it had been such an amazing, emotional first-time abroad experience for all of us involved, including my conductor, that had created a common bond on an emotional level that only, in my life, music has ever been able to create in me. Of course, my mother could never have understood that.

Any gifts ever given me by a boyfriend were greeted with a snide, "So what did you have to do to get that?"

I was forbidden to wear black, a denim skirt or a denim jacket for creating the image that I was a "denim girl" (her words, not mine) or a devil worshipper. In my mother's eyes, evidently, the clothes made the person...no matter what. Even the most wholesome Little House on the Prairie-esque girl, who happened to be a close friend of mine, had a denim jacket but that did not phase my mother. She was convinced that, if I wore a denim jacket then I would next be out on the corner with the tree frogs smoking during break.

She told somebody, I have no idea who, that my best friend in school was a slut. Word got back to her, or her mother, or somebody and her mother told her that she was to no longer associate with me. From my point of view, suddenly my best friend did not acknowledge my existence. I had no idea what had occurred and, when I confronted my mother about what I came to learn in a heated blow-out, she denied absolutely everything.

Of course. Easier that way. I would kill to make that right, to show that one cannot judge others by the actions of their parents. But I cannot.

I have spent most of my life trying to please my mother, make her proud of me and the kind of daughter that reflected well the work of her parents, and moreso, to prove to her that I merited her respect and, moreso, her trust. I pushed myself to be a straight-A student in high school and college while being a star violinist, a star debater, a star on the math team, on the school board, holding various jobs at once, getting good scholarships to a good university, going to Girls' State, being a leader, being literally the best I could be in absolutely everything I overextended myself in doing and trying to always do good...but I always, in her eyes, made the wrong decisions. I was accused of working with "filthy folk" when I started volunteering with the Mexican migrant community in Northern Oregon. I was asked why I couldn't go to a rich country "like Spain or something" when I announced I was going to study and live in Ecuador. I then got a well-paying job right out of college teaching for the Japanese Ministry of Education in Japan...and that was good but "couldn't I have gotten something closer?"

I got a full-tuition waiver as a Grant Scholar and Instructor of Spanish at Tulane so I could pursue my Ph.D. My mother's last words as I left for school were, "You know, you could develop, um, 'other' interests"...meaning: "Find yourself a husband." So I did. That is what was expected of me, and I complied always with the expectation. Of course, she has worked to break our marriage apart since it began and my sister thought I was overreacting until she, too, got married and my mother stopped bothering me so much and started in on her.

If anything, this has done wonders for my relationship with my sister. We now understand each other so much better!

When I was 20 and so sick with monthly cramps that I could not walk, would turn ghostly white and would scream still after taking 8 Advil, my mother said that nobody could hurt that badly. My father, always my defender, took me to my doctor who ran blood tests on me and found that I was not only severely anemic but that I could be suffering some extreme endometriosis, which a surgery later that week proved that I was. My mother didn't speak to me for quite some time after that. I think she felt guilty.

I was told when I was pregnant with La Princesita not to ever expect any childcare or help from her. Then I was battered with thoughts from her like, "And what are you going to do if you have a 'special needs' baby? What then?" I still, to this day, don't know what she expected me to answer...but when I cornered her on this the THIRD time she started in when I was expecting The Young Prince, she denied ever saying such things. She visited me for an hour five days after La Princesita was born--after 20 hours of natural labor the placenta had adhered and I had to have it cut out of me--which ended up infecting at four weeks postpartum and I thought I was going to die when I went back into labor to deliver the placenta pieces, delirious with fever, all alone, with a new baby four weeks old, no husband around and no mother who would come help me. Little did I know then that my great-grandmother had died four weeks post-partum after having my grandmother and her twin brother, of the exact same thing back in 1924.

I, of course, was "overreacting"...just as I always had done.

I miscarried at 13 weeks and she did not come to help out because she didn't want to be a part of a "community event"--not to mention that it was believed by her that I caused the miscarriage because I lived too far away from "family support"...this coming from the same mouth of she who said that I was to expect NO support from her with my children. We had our huge accident in which my husband broke his back and I sustained chest injuries that had me not able to breathe well for six weeks, and she didn't come to help for the same reasons...thank God I have a family made of the greatest friends in the world here (She-Ra...to name-drop).

She thinks it unreasonable that we will not consider changing our entire careers so we can move back to Oregon and live by her. That had been her great motivation in trying to break up my marriage (which is falling apart well on its own momentum, thank you very much), to have me move back to where she is...all she wants is to have me there, she's not interested in the "package deal" I now am.

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I have come to see and understand that my mother is jealous. Of what? Of opportunities I have had, of the generation in which I had been fortunate enough to have been born, of decisions I have made to just JUMP and do something new, of my being more like her own mother than like her--the same woman who she sees as having abandoned her not only after her own father died by marrying another and moving away but also by dying unexpectedly of a heart attack in the middle of the night when she was 62. All the people important in my mother's life have left her side at some level--my father left her widowed at 54; I had grown and flown at 18, never to return to live long-term in Oregon; my sister also left the area; her mother; her brother is only 300 miles north but they hardly ever see each other; the rest of her bloodline is pretty much all back in Minnesota. Her lifelong friends in Oregon are getting older and some are dying. She is alone, yet is unwilling to make any changes so that she is not so alone.

I am working hard to understand where she is coming from. I felt I had been pushed away from her when I made the decision to leave home and stay away in my early 20s. I felt she didn't like the person I had become and, instead of being a source of pride I was instead a symbol of how much she had failed as a mother. That is what she told me not two years ago--and I cannot counter how she has raised two daughters, both with graduate degrees, never been in trouble with the law or into drugs, with lovely children and lives of our own is normally not considered "failing" as a parent. But she sees our leaving her side as a failure on her part.

There are things that my mother did or said while raising the two of us that I will never repeat. The communication was terrible and I could not ask her questions or approach her in any way. I knew I would have things thrown back in my face or be teased to no end, so I ceased to depend on my mother as a source of confidence. She made that so. I can tell you the times I would go in and sit on her bed, trying to open up and talk to her. She closed the doors. I already do not do that with either of my children; I stop everything no matter what I am doing if they have to talk to me. I have made that decision. I want my children to talk to me.

There is so much in my upbringing for which I admire and thank my mother. She dedicated her life to raising my sister and I, making sure we always came home to somebody in the house, that we always had healthy food to eat, that we had ample time together as a family, that we had special traditions that we would look forward to for each season. She taught me the value of staying home with my children, which gave me the motivation to figure out a way to teach while staying at home--and thus teaching my children that they can do whatever they want if they can put their minds to it!

I love my mother very much. The last year or so has involved a great deal of introspection and attempting to comprehend better my mother's position in Life, and to learn to respect her, her difficulties, our misunderstandings and how I, as her daughter, can work to better our relationship. I speak to my mother usually about once every week or two, and our conversations are now much more pleasant than they had ever been. I have made it clear I will not discuss certain topics and, if she attempts to bait me, I will not continue the conversation. I will not tolerate attacks. Such limits have helped (at least me) to enjoy the time we have together and the conversations we do have.

Baby steps. So far, really, great strides have been made since my father's death. However, nobody is ever the same person following the loss of a life partner, a lover--and, from my point of view, a great role model and who was always my personal defender and hero. So we must adjust, adapt, and accept our new places in Life with grace while using what we have learned thus far to further deepen our respect for the Other, always, in our lives..

Happy Mother's Day.