It Goes Both Ways. A Mother's Day Tale.

Blessings to all of you moms who are doing the hard work of raising the next generation.  I’m sure you are navigating this role with the incredible mindfulness required to enjoy the tasks asked of you on a daily basis.  This is a story about the rest of us.

Many of my friends and clients tell me that they have come to terms with their disappointing mothers.  Their mothers didn’t measure up in so many ways.  Their work or our work together is to find ways to let their mom’s off the hook, finding empathy for why they are (or were) the way they are and the mothering choices they have made.  Then we move to self-empathy for the needs that were not met over so many years in those parent relationships. 

All this is very good work. 

I have engaged in this kind of personal work as well for years and am so grateful for how it served me and my mom in the final years of her life —which by the way, I didn’t know were her final years.

My mother passed in 2008. 

It was the same year Rafa Nadal won Wimbledon for the first time.  It was what some call the best tennis match ever.  It was a 5 set nail-biter between Rafa and Roger Federer.  I remember preparing my mother’s home for Shiva with the TV on.  Okay…back to my point.  My mom and me, our life together and my matrilineal legacy.

As a very young child my mom was everything to me.  My memories of sitting in the kitchen in the morning after my siblings went to school and my Dad left for work are delightful.  She would be having her instant Maxwell House cup of coffee, I would be sitting across from her at the kitchen table and I couldn’t be happier.  I loved those mornings.  I guess we just talked.  Sometimes I got to make the jello for that night’s desert.  I was very good at it, absolutely making sure all the crystals of the jello box were dissolved in the boiling water before adding the cold.

I think my mom loved our relationship too.  Her thing was having a family —kids.  A simple dream that ultimately fell apart —as did she when it happened.

I was young and didn’t have the capacity to really understand what happened for my mom when my father (the love of her life) left to find his own true happiness —which I think he did, thank goodness.  Our relationship changed almost instantly resulting in years and years of confusion, arguments, or simply wanting the other to be different.  As the years went on and I became an adult, we continued to blame each other for how unhappy we were with each other. While we visited, spent time and did general mom-daughter things together, it often wasn’t pleasant.   In my mind, she was the parent, she was the adult, concluding that the downfall of our relationship lay clearly on her shoulders.

I am so grateful for the personal work I have done in my life.  I was able to navigate to a relationship that worked for us both, likely not exactly what either of us dreamed of, yet felt loving and connecting and for me, purposeful.  I became the person that I wanted with her —living the values that were important to me in the relationship.  It gives me comfort now that she is gone.

Until recently, I haven’t explored the idea of how I contributed to the distress we felt.  Let me nuance what I mean.  I was quite aware that I contributed to the distress, yet in my thinking what I did was always a response to her ‘bad behavior’.  I was doing the best I could, often really well, given how challenging she made it for me.  These past few weeks my focus is on who I was and who I could have been regardless of who and how she was.  That our relationship was between us, rather than her responsibility.  

I feel a bit melancholy thinking about this, and what might have been.  I also feel a deep sense of connection with my mom and the disappointment she must have felt for a good deal of her life.  Steeped in the emotional comfort that NVC offers me [I could never have done anything wrong], I am blessed to experience the needs that I longed for as I was navigating life with her.  I am also blessed to be deeply connected to the needs that she was longing for as well.  I’m not sure how this new way of considering our relationship will impact my relationships and life moving forward.  I do feel enthusiastic in the inquiry.

I am grateful that throughout all of my life I was fully confident that my mom loved me.  That having kids and a family was her dream. I had no doubts that I belonged and who my tribe was.  She provided that for me, no matter what.  

This Mother’s Day, I plan to stay fully absorbed in the richness of these thoughts and this connection.