Life With Mother: Behind the Bond

There will be two holiday celebrations at my home today. The obligatory orange-juice-and-toast-on-a-tray breakfast-in-bed for me. And the traditional birthday cake for the child whose birth made me a mother 16 years ago today.

My daughter wasn’t actually born on Mother’s Day. That would have been too perfect, would have supercharged my fantasy of motherhood as one long string of Hallmark cards.

She arrived the next morning, when my exhilaration was tinged with a vague sense of failure, as if my mothering would somehow be compromised because I’d failed to deliver her in time to celebrate the holiday.

Back then, I thought of giving birth as the grand finale of pregnancy. I had produced a baby in much the same way a writer produces a book or a chef a gourmet meal. She was the culmination of nine months of clean living and constant prayer.

I didn’t realize then that I hadn’t just given birth to a baby. I had helped create a child, a teenager, a grown woman . . . a work in progress whose relationship with the world--and with me--would change over time.

Today, she’ll stand impatiently, as I open my Mother’s Day gifts and her sisters and I sing “Happy Birthday.” She’ll be listening but clamoring for my car keys, desperate to break free.

And I will watch her wistfully, and try to remember the baby she once was, and the mother I imagined I would be.

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It has taken me three kids and 16 years to put parenting in perspective, to realize that I’m raising people, not children. That they are moving irrevocably beyond my reach. That the most important part of my job is not making them happy and comfortable, but preparing them to live without me.

Sure, I miss those early years, before I lost the power to dry tears with a kiss, to make the boogeyman vanish with magic words. Once, I could produce a smile just by cooing my daughters’ names, could make their eyes light up by walking into the room. Now, they are more apt to snicker than smile--at my clothes, my singing voice, my motherly platitudes.

At 10, 12 and, now, 16, my girls seem like babies one day, grown women the next. They push against the limits I set yet hold tight to childhood routines. They hurl insults at me sarcastically but seek my approval desperately.

I am learning--they are teaching me--that they don’t need me less as they grow, only differently. And though I sometimes push too hard or expect too little, coddle too often or criticize too much, mothering is a long-haul endeavor, and it will be years before I’ll know if I’ve made the grade.

In the meantime, I’ve learned not to sweat the small stuff. A “C” in science in fourth grade doesn’t portend a lifetime of mediocrity. Eventually, the braces will come off and the orthodontist’s bill will be paid. The day we lost blankie at Chuck E. Cheese will, one day, no longer rank as life’s biggest catastrophe. And over time, most of my mistakes will fade.

“I wish I was back in preschool,” my teenager sometimes says. Then, her most daunting challenge was coloring inside the lines. Now, there is homework and romance and college exams, wearing her down at every turn.

But sometimes at night when she can’t sleep, she crawls into bed alongside me and I nuzzle her soft, brown hair, and find a baby’s scent buried there. Then I think back on all she’s been and marvel at all she’s yet to become. And I am overwhelmed with love.

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I should have gotten a clue on the day we brought our daughter home. My husband’s mother was here from Ohio. During the four days I was hospitalized, she made his meals, ironed his shirts, packed his lunches and cleaned the house.

It was our first night home, and the baby was inconsolable. I nursed her, rocked her, walked the floor . . . and still she wailed. In the middle of the night, my mother-in-law was drawn to our room by the baby’s cries. “Do you want me to take the baby?” she asked. I shook my head, sensing a challenge to my mothering.

But her eyes were not on me or her new grandchild. She was watching her son, who lay sleepless in bed. “Try to get the baby quiet,” she told me gently, shuffling over to the bed. “Because Jackie’s got work in the morning and he needs to get his sleep.” And she leaned over her son and pulled the comforter up to his chin, then brushed his 35-year-old forehead with a kiss.

She’s tucking him in, I realized. He may have just become a father, but he had not ceased to be her child. And though I did not know it then, her gesture spoke volumes about mother-love, the unbreakable cord that binds mother to child through time.

The baby in my arms that night is now taller than I and no longer needs to be rocked to sleep. But she will never outgrow my embrace, or age beyond her mother’s reach.

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Sandy Banks’ column runs on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.