Mother’s Day

My three daughters are great kids, who’ve caused me endless trouble, anxiety, heart-ache, and sorrow. They’ve also made me proud many, many times: proud of their good grades and accomplishments, proud of their generosity and kindness, proud of their moral choices. And they’ve given me bountiful love, the kind that seeps in and exalts the heart. Best of all, they’ve provided me with so many opportunities to love. I love loving them, and how that has made me a better person. I try to be the best Traci I can be, because I want the best for them.

But it’s never easy. I’ve got a fraught situation with a difficult former husband. And, like many other mothers, I have to deal with therapists and sometimes even teachers or guidance counselors who think they know my kids better than I do. They don’t. 45 minutes once a week on a therapist’s couch is not the same, and never will be, as 24/7/365 of a kid feeling free to be her worst, most demanding, most selfish, most regressed self. One of my daughters is a master at seeming to be the most reasonable, most mature, most insightful young woman in the whole entire world. She’s fooled some shrinks with that act. Note that these are shrinks who do not have kids of their own. In some real way, it’s not an act; she is that reasonable, mature, and insightful. However. She also throws tantrums, lies, distorts, manipulates, demands, etc. She falls apart or otherwise engineers a disaster and expects me to pick up the pieces–and I usually do. I’ve come to believe that anyone who hasn’t seen her throw a tantrum doesn’t know the real kid. 

And I am very skeptical of therapists or psychiatrists who don’t have children of their own. Until you’ve been there, day in, day out, every minute of every hour of every day for every year since this child tore her or his way out of your womb (or you adopted!), there is simply NO WAY to understand the relentless mental and emotional and physical burden that is parenting. It’s thankless, bone-wearying, soul-crushing, all-consuming, and never ends. Because having a child changes you in ways that are irrevocable. Even when a parent is 80, they would still do anything to save their child; an 80 year old mother will still say, if her 60 year old child dies, that losing a child is the worst thing that can happen.

All this said, I consider myself lucky to have my children. Despite everything, I not only love my feisty, opinionated, dramatic, high intensity, high maintenance girls–I also like them. They’re funny and smart, lively and inventive. I enjoy being with them. My life is far richer and sweeter because of them. They’re blessings, sometimes the kind of blessings that rend the heart, sometimes the kind that mend it. Happy Mother’s Day to me.