I had hoped to find a happy medium, but it’s easy to get swept into the lives of your spawn. After all, it’s through them that you witness a new germination of hopes and dreams, dreams you were either too busy or too lazy to see to fruition for yourself. There were dance recitals, sports, music competitions, cheerleading, scouts, gymnastics, scholastic achievements, art classes, and more. Motherly pride got quite a workout in those days. Perhaps I felt a need to make up for all the parent-teacher conferences my own mother never attended.
As it happens all too often, somewhere along the way it became un-cool to have such an attentive mother. It’s sometimes un-cool to have any mother at all. So like many mothers, I faded to the background of my children’s lives, only to emerge for culinary or monetary emergencies. Besides, they’re adults now.
My favorite book growing up was Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and my favorite passage was “On Children.”
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Article comments
1 - Nicole Pulliam
Thank you for writing this, I to have 'wounds' from my past and I often fall so short with my own children. This was refreshingly honest and respectful.
2 - Bliffle
Good article.
I still think your picture is a little sunshine among the glowering republicans on BC.
My own mother was not very good. Not in the least warm. We all knew that Dad was the warm one. I don't miss my mother at all. I remember my dad fondly every week.
So I repeated the pattern: my wives were not very good mothers for my children. Except, maybe, in small ways, like they quit smoking and drinking when pregnant.
My grandfather rescued his kids from the crazy mother, but my dad and I both failed to rescue our kids. It was hard to do in the 20th century, but I understand that it is easier now.
3 - Dr. Juliann Mitchell, PhD
Thanks Joanne. I think I am going to call my Mom and say thank you again.