Mother Made
It seems odd to me, sometimes, that a single day is set aside to honor mothers. Or fathers, for that matter. Or Jesus (for Heaven’s sake!) though, technically, I guess he gets two.
Mothers are given a deep-breath recognition on one day out of THREE-HUNDRED-SIXTY-FIVE. It hardly feels sufficient.
And, yet, I have a plastic shoe box filled with homemade cards and trinkets that begs to differ.
I can say from experience, however, that the real prizes come randomly. Rarely wrapped. Sometimes not distinguishable until time has its way with them. But the crate full of “I Love You”s and “You’re the GREATESTEST”s with intermittent backward letters mark time. Sentiments piled upon paper butterflies rolling around in a container full of flowers fashioned out of clay serve as a conduit to the days that birthed them.
I’m grateful someone somewhere once decided we should pause to raise a glass.
In honor of Mother’s Day week, the following is an excerpt from “The Compost File: Stories for the Striver in Us All”—along with a photo and a song that wouldn’t fit in the book.😉
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If you’re reading this, you have one. Or you had one—though I can’t imagine a mom being past tense even if she’s gone. It’s the universal tie that binds, the inextricable link of life. We are because she was.
And is.
And forever more shall be.
Mothers have the most demanding, integral job on the planet—and yet what’s crazy is nobody knows how to do it. None of us. Not even the supermoms who self-profess by the stickers on their SUV’s back glass. We all just grope around in the dark, hoping against all hope that we don’t break things as we go. Yet, mothers are supposed to know . . . how to do things, when to do things, what the best things are to do. So, we try. But the dirty little secret is, we do a lot of guessing, too.
The truest confession I ever heard from a new mother about her hot-off-the-press child was, “I don’t have any idea who she is, but she sure does.” Maybe I love her sentiment so much because it sort of summed up my baby number two.
My second child, Chandler, came reluctantly (we thought) because she missed her arrival date by over a week, and I had to be induced. However, we quickly discovered we’d mis-tagged her tardiness. Not that she wasn’t ready, but more so that she was warning us we better be. She came in on her own terms, serving notice. When they first laid her on my chest, she looked up at me with these giant ocean-blue eyes—not writhing, not crying, just looking—straight at me as if to say, “I’m out now and I’ve got my own ideas about how this thing is going to go.”
When said child was somewhere between barely two and almost three, on a casual drive from Oklahoma City to Norman, she put another pin in the ground. From her snuggly-safe car apparatus in the back seat, we found ourselves at an impasse over some earth-shattering matter I can no longer recall. In short, I had a plan for her behavior, and she saw it a different way. After going back and forth over the top of the head rests, I laid down the gauntlet, “You say one more word and I’m going to pull this car over and spank your bottom!”
To which my precocious daughter replied, “Word.” Defiance laced with sarcasm—at two!
Obviously, my child had given me no choice but to pull over and follow through on my threat. I could see it, somewhere deep in the unwritten handbook of Mothering for Dummies was a chapter on always doing what you said you were going to do. So, I did. As cars zoomed by at alarming rates of speed, with my vehicle parked but running, I jumped out slamming the front door as I lunged for the back so I could rush in and pounce. But before I could squeeze the handle, the baby culprit pushed the lock button and with a grin as big as Dallas began to victoriously clap her hands from the other side of the glass.
There I stood on the shoulder of the highway, my toddler locked-in and me locked-out, solidifying the fact that I was pretty much unfit to be anybody’s mom.
Oh, the things children teach us, mostly about ourselves.
My firstborn was a pleaser. He did what I asked him to do. He was adventurous, fun, and happy in the way that Disney dreamers aim for when they sit down at their desks to create. Colton was high-energy and rambunctious, but he was easy. Easy in a way that juked me. It made me feel like I had somehow cornered the market, that I’d stumbled upon the mummying secret. Like maybe I’d figured this thing out.
But you’ve already met Chandler, so you know that wasn’t true.
We have ideas, us baby-bearing creatures. We have things we envision ourselves teaching our kids and things we imagine them doing. “Look both ways before you cross the street.” “Be kind to others.” “Share your toys.” “Say your prayers.” We see them in Easter clothes and Halloween costumes. We see them leaving cookies and milk for Santa as well as hay and water for the reindeer he’ll leave parked in the backyard snow. We see them in prom regalia, high school jerseys, caps and gowns, and wedding whites. But there is so much that isn’t visible when we draw the future inside our heads.
It never works out exactly like we think it will. Mostly because we have no way of knowing who these teensy people are. Not really. Even when they grow inside us.
We think our job is to make them—to make them into something or someone. But our job is really to supply them room to make themselves.
Guiding a child to adulthood is daunting. We try to teach and model morals, values, friendship, boundaries (lived by and broken), self-expression, confidence, empathy, work ethic—all the things we know they’ll need in the world outside our walls. But the internal and external wrangling involved in learning . . . that’s for them.
P.S. Like My Mother Does