Thoughts about my mother

My mom several years ago during a trip to the beach, beautiful despite the wind :)

It is difficult to sit down and write about the person who most influences your life. It is even more difficult to do so without being clichéd. So much is said about mothers, and it can be a challenge to distinguish the sincerely meant words from those which just sound nice. So I begin to think about my ever-changing relationship with my mother, which, thankfully, has almost always (but sometimes not) been a good one.

We did not have a good relationship when I was in the 9^th grade. That was the year that, after being homeschooled since kindergarten, I patently refused to go to a traditional high school, deciding instead that, because I knew best about my education, as all 14 year olds do, I would be homeschooled all the way through high school. My mother agreed, on one condition: that we use a package curriculum, rather than do what we had always done and use a curriculum that she chose herself from different textbook companies. I consented and that year was a disaster from the very beginning. Mom chose a well-known company, but the rigidity of their requirements—things like using the few assignments they graded for 75% of my total grade—made it difficult for me to care. The volume of work was immense and after a month or so, it began to seem totally pointless. However, as neither one of us wanted to give in for our various reasons (Mom because the curriculum had been expensive and me because my pride was dearer), we stuck it through to the end. Both of us, I believe, were relieved when I went off to private school in the fall, a school which, although not perfect, allowed us the space we needed to enable our relationship to become more than it was at that point.

Our relationship suffered again five years later when I began dating a young man who, though not at all a bad person, was not right for me with regards to his ambition or his personality. Like all 19 year olds, though, I knew best once again, and caused both of my parents a lot of suffering because of my stubbornness in insisting, once again, that I was right and that my way was what was right for me. I couldn’t see any merits in her argument that being yoked with a partner who was unequal would make me miserable; in those terrible months of constant fighting, she revealed so much of the agony she had gone through in a similar relationship when she was my age, and yet I still spurned her counsel. Eventually, though, that relationship ended and thankfully my mother and I became close again.

Many of the young women I know run screaming at the idea of becoming their mother; I embrace it. Our voices are often mistaken on the telephone, and whenever a caller apologizes for thinking I am my mother, I thank them, catching them off guard. It is as if the expectation is still there for young women of my generation to be like the young women of hers and be offended at the thought of being their own mothers, horribly backwards and not enlightened. My mother is a fantastic, fascinating person and if I grow up to be anything like her, I will have achieved so much. While she has had many part time teaching and tutoring jobs during my lifetime, her heart has always been at home; she is a nurturing, caring individual, so it comes as no surprise to anyone that she is a teacher. She is smart, but chooses to use her mental faculties to educate and care for her family first and foremost, rather than just worrying about a paycheck. My college friends who live far away love coming home with me because she’s a wonderful cook; her meals may not be exotic, but they are made with talent and caring, which makes them even better.

I can remember as a child having friends whose mothers embarrassed them, not because of what they did, but because of who they were. I don’t ever remember having those feelings about my own mother. I cherished her then as a rarity among the mothers I knew and I cherish her now as a dear friend.

Look for another post in the near future about becoming my mother.