Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day tomorrow. In honor of that event, which is really about the very successful move on the part of the greeting card industry to sell more stuff, I want to muse for a bit about a Shadowy aspect of being a mother.

I haven't met a single mother -- but there may be some out there somewhere -- who hasn't made the following promise: "I will raise my children in so much better ways than my mother raised me."

Why is it that we get into this sort of place? It's a grandiose vow. It assumes that our parents were benighted, stupid, unwilling or unable to exert themselves in the business of child rearing. We come to learn, as we try to live this vow out, that it really is a little over the top. We discover that we are equally as human as our parents were, and that, while we may not make exactly the same mistakes, we do pull some pretty big blunders. Oftentimes we have to admit that our children are actually less well adapted in some ways than we are. If that's the result of parenting skills, well, we really have to eat some crow.

But all of that is not the shadowy aspect of this issue. The shadowy aspect is that the whole way of thinking is about proving something. It's a dialogue with our mothers rather than anything having to do with our children. "I'm not going to let MY children do. . . (like you did)" is essentially a statement of accusation and resentment. It's a terrible basis from which to make well-thought-out responses to our children's needs.

My mother's way of trying to instill a change of behavior in her children was to brow-beat them with dogma. I swore I'd never do that to my children, and I didn't. I had reasonable conversations with them. I asked them questions about why they made the choices they did, and explained why I thought the choices could have been better. Only, when I was really disappointed and hurt, my father's communication style -- sarcastic innuendo -- would creep into the discussions.

My children didn't know they had been saved from dogmatic brow-beating. All they knew is that when I got mad I got mean. I'm sure my daughter promised never to do that to her children.

I think this dialogue with our mothers stems from our collective fantasy that parents really can "do it right". If you have a Good Mother, you have kids with a sense of self-esteem, inner resources, access to their native creativity and intellegence, and the ability to love generously. If you have a Bad Mother, well, you have the opposite. EVERY mother is TERRIFIED of being a bad mother.

Here's the reality. No matter how hard we work at it, no matter how creative, loving, and watchful we are, we are not ever going to be perfect parents. We will be wise in some ways and utterly stupid in others. We'll have days when we're at the top of our form, creative geniuses in child rearing. We'll have others when we feel like Satan has taken over our brains and green pea soup is spewing from our mouths. Worse -- we might not even recognize some of the pea soup moments.

We will not be able to protect our kids from the real dangers and pitfalls of growing up. Drug addictions, HIV/AIDS, gang involvement, pregnancy -- these are but a few of the things we can work hard to combat in dialogue with our children, but which are ultimately out of our control. There are so many many more.

My advise to all you working parents out there is to give up on the grandiose vows to your parents made out of resentment and hurt. Instead, pray a lot. Get the best help you can. Take yourself off the hook of thinking everything is all your fault. If you see something that alarms you, shout it from the rooftops and don't quit shouting until somebody believes you. And, well, pray a lot.

Happy Mother's Day.