When it comes to motherhood usually I talk about myself as a mother and what that has meant to me. I rarely, if ever, discuss my own mother and our relationship, except in passing. We have, at best, a complicated relationship. I distinctly remember telling my kids “You will never treat me the way I treat my mother, you don’t know what my life was like.” As I have gotten older I realize what a horrible child I have been, and still sometimes am.
My mother and I have a complicated, at best, relationship. There are some reasons, in the grand scheme of things none of them are good ones. Please don’t misunderstand me, I love my mother, we are so much alike and yet so different we butt heads, and we are both strong, independent women, and we like our own way… a lot. If you involve my sister too, another strong, independent woman who likes to be right, and it is positively a miracle blood has never been shed.
Your mom is the person who is always on your side, keeps your first drawing, brags you up to friends and grandparents, who will drive 500 miles to see you finally graduate from nursing school at 30 years old.
A mom is often the person you look and act like, even when you don’t want to. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. ~ Oscar Wilde ~ Even when not raised by a birth parent, children can have mannerisms of the absent parent, and when adopted can also have traits of adoptive parents. A mom is much more then genetics, it’s more about love. It’s staying awake with a sick child, not yelling when the sick child throws up on your rugs and just cleaning it up, it’s giving advice about bullies and healing broken hearts, it’s begging someone to take your shift and taking 2 or 3 of theirs in return because your child forgot to bring home a note about a program.
Being a mom means being the last person who picks the restaurant, eating cold food, cleaning the gross stuff, being able to break up fights, the ability to remember the addresses and phone numbers of every friend your child has, mathematical skills to spend the same amount of money on every child, and the knowledge of how to sneak vegetables into meals. It also means loving people more than you ever thought possible, even when they are not lovable.
Being a mom is the best job I have ever had, and it is not thankless, every time I see my son with his daughter I know that I must have done something right. I think I have the mom part down, I just need to improve the daughter part. I do love my mom, and I appreciate all the wrinkles and gray hairs that were caused by me, and I love that she passed on her faith, her love of people, her strong sense of family, and love of knowledge to us. The biggest compliment I ever got from my dad made me angry at first, he was talking about how like my mother I am, made me crabby, I am like myself. Then he said, “I will never forget the first time I saw your mom, in a room full of people she was twice as much alive as everyone else. It’s not just that she’s smart and funny, she is, she is just so amazing that all others grow dim next to her.” So, knowing that, I am proud and happy that I remind people of my mom, she left us a pretty great legacy to follow.
About the author:
MamaSteph has 2 kids by birth and several by love, she is a nurse and enjoys finding healthier ways to make comfort foods, gardening, enjoying nature, and living life to the fullest…For a list of her blogs please click here.
