Mother's Day; From The Other Side

May 8, 2016

I have to say I don't want to write this.  For a myriad of reasons.  The first being Mother's Day is painful for me.  It always has been.  More so this year because it's the first without my mom.  After a long illness she left in January.  And though our relationship swung between distant and close, she was an intricate part of my existence.  Mistakes and all.  (Made on both sides, I can assure you.)  Yet, I've forced myself to sit here because I know I am not the only person who struggles on this day.

The constructed package of sainted motherhood we have is so well-known I don't need to go into it.  And for some rare women maybe it's the reality.  But for most, it's not.  For some, motherhood is an overwhelming journey of incredible highs and agonizing lows.  And on this day when we worship the deification of mothers everywhere people pretend these moms don't exist.

We do.  And - secrets exposed - I think we are the majority.  We are the 'guilty-moms', the 'not-good-enough' moms.  The 'you-failed-as-a-mother' moms.  We are the self- (and outer-) judged 'bad-mothers'.  We are the moms who have watched our children turn into less than stellar human beings.  We are the moms of people who self destruct and/or destroy others.  We are the mothers who are rejected, used, punished, abused or ignored by our children.  We are the mothers who lay awake (for years) tearing apart everything; every mistake we made, every choice we failed, everything ugly, bad mood, selfish instance and impatient moment we had in an effort to figure out exactly where we tainted those lives most precious to us.

Worse still, our bodies are torture chambers, dungeons built from the job we are now certain we weren't qualified to have.  Encased in constant reminders of how we failed and what we've lost, it hurts to live in our skin.  Every inch holds memories.  Feet remember the nights we paced the floors.  Fingers can still feel the silken strands we stroked when we gave comfort.  Our stretch-marks are scars from a child who grew to adulthood ashamed of us, hating us, blaming us, lashing out at us or, worse yet, rejecting us completely.  Our breasts ache, heavy with the hopes we cannot let go of and the kiss that once landed on our cheek returns to us with every passing breeze.

And we are everywhere: at work faking happiness, in bars drowning in Bloody Marys, at the store filling anti-depressant prescriptions, or folded over in the women's room sobbing with our hands clamped over our mouths.  Because for us motherhood is a ghost-filled house where we exist between bearing our sentence, struggling for absolution or wishing for death.  Draping the halls of the best we had to give, phantoms infest the shadows.  Dark corners alive with our mistakes, both real and perceived, they hiss and whisper in every single room.  Stirred by the slightest thing they become a howling, nightmare choir smothering the light from any of the times we managed (somehow) to get it right.

It hurts to be us.  And on this day the pain is unavoidable.  Today, moms are everywhere.  Everyone is a son or daughter, and every woman is a step-mom, grandmom, second mom or mother.  Pictures, ads, flower deliveries, and bright, cheerful gift-bags abound.  Sappy songs and Hollywood-quality moments fill the air.  And here we are, some even in the midst of celebratory lunches and brunches, regret clogging our throats like toxic perfume.

Late last year, I caught a glimpse of what it looks like from the other side of the divide.  One night, just months before she died, my mom called me.  She was crying so hard I almost couldn't understand her.  When she could finally speak, she begged me to forgive her for being a "bad mom".  For being too critical of me, for times she played favorites between my sister and I, for punishing me for my father's cruelty to her, and for those instances when her discipline was too harsh.  She outlined events in such rich, living detail I realized, like me, she was haunted by missing the mark of perfected motherhood.  As the mother of three children, dragging behind me a past littered by mistakes mothers weren't supposed to make, I understood the weight of her guilt.  And I forgave her for her greatest 'failing' as a mom.  I forgave her for being human.

You see, with the plastic image of impossible perfection attached to it, motherhood is a stress-filled, unobtainable ideal for everyone, but most especially for us moms who know we're not goddesses or archetypes or Madonnas.  We had bad days.  We made wrong choices.  We got angry and sometimes we were oblivious.  And worse yet, at times we got resentful of all the responsibility we struggled to carry.  Like any other human being we had moments of thoughtlessness,  unable to see how our flares of humanness would affect our children.

Recognizing that my mother was flawed and human was the best gift I ever gave her.  A true acknowledgement of her effort to meet a task she had no clue how to accomplish.  Most especially given the image she was supposed to live up to.  Because there are no special instructions and even if there were, what living, breathing woman has the ability to read, study and implement them all perfectly and consistently.  By recognizing her humanity and all it entailed, I gave her permission to be what she was; a woman who loved in a most human way which, though far from perfect, was the absolute best she had to give.  Doing so granted her the release so many mothers believe they will never have.  And I know, after many more conversations, it went a long way towards bringing her peace.

Mother's Day is no picnic for me.  I twinge and ache when I remember my own run at it.  Take my word for it, it wasn't glorious.  Like nearly everyday I have left on this Earth, I will spend today wondering if my children will find it in themselves to forgive me my humanity.  And this year, with my mother gone, the day will be harder to get through.  Because my house is still haunted and probably always will be.  But there's hope.  By granting my mother the right to be fallible maybe I can begin to forgive the mother in me as well.

I cannot change the past.  Nor do I have any control over the perceptions of my children now that they are grown and parents themselves.  The only thing I have power over is myself.  And looking back I am learning to see the humanness in my mistakes as well as the love for them that was always there, even when I didn't show it as well as I could have.  And though I was not always able to give them the best, sometimes - being human - what I gave was what I had.

Happy Mother's Day.