My mother always said that she did the best she could at the time with the knowledge and skills she had at that moment. I never knew what that really meant, or how true that was. I thought that meant that she subscribed to the best parenting theory she could find at the time. I never knew that inside, my mom didn’t have all the answers, and that our childhood was not a great experiment in child development theory. Rather, my mother was just trying to get by. Some days all you can manage is to keep everyone dressed and fed, that happy is a far distant second. Some days the children eat nothing but cereal and you let them trash the house because you haven’t the ability to summon the strength to parent the way you had always intended. Sometimes you can’t even summon the strength to get off the couch.
I could not see that by living her values, by following the life that made her as close to whole and balanced as she could be, my mother was teaching me how to be a person of worth, not just a pampered child who would grow into a selfish adult. I didn’t realize that giving your child everything can turn them into a grown-up you don’t like at all.
“Your job is to make me happy!” my four-year-old screamed at me one day, and at that moment I finally realized that no, it wasn’t. My job was to raise him and his brother to be good people that would tread lightly on the earth and have hearts I was proud of. My job was to love him and lead him, but most of all, to keep him alive. The bottom line of motherhood is protecting our little ones. His job was to find happiness. Until that moment, I didn’t fully realize that it wasn’t my mother’s job to make me happy, either.
I didn’t realize my mother was a woman with unfulfilled dreams and ambitions, too. That being the boss was a friendless place. That there was no one she could lean on, besides Pat. That without Pat, she might have crumbled into dust. I did not understand my mother at all until one day I, too, stood with my fragile, grown-up heart breaking in my own chest and two tiny faces looking at me to make their world okay. I did not know that mothers get lonely, too. That being a mother does not obliterate all the emotional needs you have always had.
I also learned that summers pass quickly as an adult; that you mean to go to the beach more often, and you want to go to the amusement park, but between their trips with Daddy and sports and friends, it is all gone before you do half the things you mean to. The endless summers of childhood are just ten weekends and the kids are off with Daddy for four of them, leaving only six, and you want to take the kids camping for a week and that leaves just five, and you still have to clean the house and mow the lawn and sometimes it rains. I learned that getting to the beach twice in a summer took Herculean effort. I realized all that my mother did do to give us the childhood we had, in spite of tight finances and a full-time job and a chronically ill spouse.
I did not know that although you are a mother, you are still a woman, and if you don’t feed all the different parts of you, if you just mother everyone, you give away bits of your soul until you have nothing left and are of no use to anyone. I did not know the hollow aching loneliness after the children are asleep or not home, and how it can consume you, and how you need a life or else you will throw yourself under a bus, and then the children will have no mother at all, and anything you need to do to keep yourself out from under the bus tires—work, romance, art, politics—whatever keeps you out of the roadside ditch is as vital to your children’s well-being as wiping their bottoms and runny noses.
You know what else? While I was figuring all this out, while I was struggling to find the balance between the mother I wanted to be and the mother I had to be, while I was fighting to not lose my soul and simultaneously having my heart burst into a thousand shiny pieces by the love of a gummy toothless smile, my mother snuck in and bought me a house. She gave my children and me the security we needed, which was only possible thanks to the career I resented. While I was busy resenting and stamping feet and coming to terms with who I was as a woman and who I was as a mother and who I should have been as a daughter, she just quietly came in and held me up, as I was trying to hold my babies up.
In the end, no matter how we manage the triangulation between woman, mother, and lover, what matters is that we hold up our babies when they need us. Even if they don’t appreciate it. Even if they don’t notice at the time that we’re doing it. If we properly manage this thing called motherhood, we all wind up okay.
the split
Stepmother made a new friend, Deb, a barber near their summer home in rural New York. Deb was fat and butch and not
