Long-Suffering Mother Learned From Real Pro
Life as a single mom is not for the squeamish. You can be sure that everything you said you’d never do to your kids you will do. Or worse, on occasion you’ll realize what you’re doing and overcompensate for it and then really ruin the poor kids.
A decade ago, my then-15-year-old daughter remarked to a chum with an acerbic half-laugh: “My mother’s writing a book. She’s calling it: ‘Raising Your Child Through Guilt and Fear.’ ”
To what did I owe this good-natured chiding?
Days before, fed up with being subjected to passing by a bedroom that looked as if the Hindenburg had blown up in it, I went on a rampage.
Traditional parental ploys--begging, bribing, screaming--had failed. I stumbled over food-encrusted dishes, cassette tapes, schoolbooks and assorted teeny-bop couture when I stormed the room. Scraping a brand new sweater off the carpet and holding it two inches from her face, I sputtered (mothers often stammer and sputter when they are really mad): “Do you have any idea how many hours I worked to buy you this sweater and you just throw it in a heap!”
Then I resorted to the time-tested
m-just-here-to-be-trampled-on-what’s-the-point-to-all-this-why-am-I-living litany, accompanied by tears, of course.
After I pulled myself together, I decided she needed a lesson in self-sacrifice.
Fetching my hand-held calculator, I tallied how many hours I had slaved at a job I hated to buy her everything a girl could want.
Hmmmm. She did not appear to be sufficiently repentant.
Not to worry; I had other tricks up my sleeve. After all, I had learned from a real pro, my own mother. And she did it, mind you, with nary a raised voice nor a single swearword. That’s style. If there is a long-sufferers’ Hall of Fame she has been inducted into it.
I began compiling a list of how many pleasures I had foregone to give my child these luxuries. In a last-ditch effort to evoke guilt, I even offered to show her my Cesarean scar. Futile. She stared at me dispassionately as if to say: “Well, she’s done it now. Stepped off the curb, gone ‘round the bend. Yep. Definitely eating with one chopstick in the chow mein!”
Somehow we both survived her wonder years.
She graduated with honors from college and is a first-grade teacher, happily married and expecting a child of her own. She is very well adjusted, save for that annoying facial tick. . . . Just kidding.
She is overjoyed at the miracle of impending birth. Overcome with wonder viewing every sonogram, feeling every feisty kick. Overflowing with opinions, theories and convictions about motherhood and parenting. My daughter doesn’t say so, but surely she vows: “I’ll never screw up my kids the way my mother did me!”
God willing, she will never be a single parent. I’d rather chew tinfoil than raise children without their father in the home. It would have been nice to have a partner with whom to share the blame.
Children come into this world so free, eager and trusting. Watch a baby taking his first steps. It never occurs to the little lughead that he’ll take a tumble. And when he does he is genuinely surprised. Just look at his face. Keep watching. In a split second you’ll see that befuddled look give rise to grin and giggle, and up, up, he’ll come to start the process all over again with the same cockeyed optimism. If only he could hold onto that attitude for a lifetime.
And if only we could become grandmothers before being mothers. Nothing to do but love and lavish, nurture and protect, play “pat-a-cake” and “cootchy-cootchy-coo” to your heart’s content.
To grandmothers and mothers, I send my best this Mother’s Day. Let’s not tamper with our recipe of discipline, consistency, respect and humor in raising healthy, happy sons and daughters.
