Mother's Day Hits Differently This Year...

This is the first year I have awoken on Mother’s Day since I became a mother that there is no one here.  None of the people who qualified me to celebrate this day are present.  Neither of them really live here anymore.  This is my first Mother’s Day as an empty nester.  Sure, my daughter still drops in now and again but I can’t remember the last time she slept here...

My journey in motherhood has been rich and replete with a great deal of blessings, miracles and love.   I guess what is landing for me today is that just like my kids have been very different kids over the last 20 years, I have been several different mothers...

Young Mother

Ok, this is a relative term because I didn’t have kids until I was 35 and 37 respectively...but when I look back at the mother I was back when my kids were born, I can barely recognize myself.  It is almost like I am looking back at someone else.  I was so stressed all the time, and I was so worried about things being orderly and clean. It feels like all of my time was spent washing something, or picking up something or making food or buying food.  When I look back on those early days I just see myself as a blur.  There are times though that land and stick...laying in bed with Logan when he was a baby every morning and just allowing the day to unfold.  Snuggling with Grace on the couch while Logan entertained us with his shows or toys.  Evening beach walks with the kids when we lived in Jacksonville.  I know I was there and wasn’t always cleaning something, but that is what I remember most.  Being stressed and everything always being a mess.

School Age Mother

I am not sure it is possible, but this time is even more of a blur.  When I think of this time in my life, I see myself and the kids in the car.  Just always going somewhere.  Soccer, tennis, school, playdates, the beach.  Just always heading somewhere with a kaleidoscope of other children mixed in.  Again, I was there, every day but this time seems consumed with transporting small people to and from locations.

Middle School Mother

This time was both stressful and not.  The pandemic hit during my daughter’s middle school experience so that was a weird time.  Everything that had been occurring at lightning speed, just  s l o w e d w a y t h e f u c k d o w n!  My son was living with his dad in Texas, and so it was just Grace and I at home with the goats.  This is a lovely time for me because everything just got easier. I got to be home more and we would walk the goats every evening.  My daughter was willing to spend time with me and it was just an easier time where time felt plentiful instead of never enough.

High School Mother

And we are back to blurring.  It feels like I blinked and my kids were done.  There were dances and graduations but it just felt like it was over way too soon.  The parade of kids continued through my home but it was over before it felt like it started.  And at the very same time, it felt like it would never fucking end.

Bonus Child Mother

Just at the time I thought I would be losing kids, I gained another one.  Not what I had planned at all but, as usual, the powers that be knew better than I did.  Riley’s arrival in my life made it better and richer and more fulfilling.  I thought it was time for kids to be moving on but instead, I got another kid and I am so very grateful for that.

Launching Adults Mother

Now the kids and I are consumed with figuring out who we are without each other.  Not that we aren’t still close and loving, but both my kids are off figuring out who they are without me.  I mean, as much as they can.  Can anyone of us, for better or worse, ever figure out who they are without a strong mother influence? I can’t.  My mom is in everything I think and do and believe and live.  I am who I am in this life in large part because of my mom.  Without her, who knows how I would have turned out.  And I think my kids are in the process of finding out that whether they love me in the moment or hate me, they are largely impacted by my presence or absence in their lives.  This is a weird time and it has been hard to let go.  I want the baby time back.  I want the school age time back.  Hell I would even take the middle school time back.  High school time was a hard time for all of us so I could skip that time being repeated.

I don’t know who I am without them.  I don’t know what to do with myself.  I am not sure what I want.  This is made harder by each of them not being actually launched and just in the launching process...I am still needed but not so much wanted on the daily.  This leaves me with a great deal of time to do what I want, except a great deal of the time, I just want them back.  I just want them home, back here with me all the time.  And then again, that very same thought makes me want to cry.  It was so beautifully and wonderfully hard this whole raising of kids thing. Motherhood was the best hardest thing I have ever done. People used to ask me what was harder being a lawyer or a mother.  Mother won every single time, no contest!

So we all are growing up together again.  I have been a different mother to each of my children’s developmental stages.  I have been me, through it all, but I have been different at each point. Rising and falling to the demands made of me for each time period.  Killing it and failing at it all the time.  Such a weird thing, the requirements for motherhood, it is a 24/7 vocation for which you receive no training and very little support.  If offered as an actual job, no one in their right mind would ever take the position.  Like ever.  

But take the job we do and then, without warning it is over and changes and requires different things from us that we do not have the experience to give.  Like now, how do I stop doing all the things I have always done.  The money, the support, the sacrifice?  How do I let them launch into their own lives?  How do I step back and just allow them to fly away?

I mean, I know they come back around.  Perhaps my most important role in my children’s lives is as backdrop.  The screensaver in their lives, just always there, sometimes taking front and center but more often, just there, a potted plant in the living room of their lives.  I see, I experience, I live but my role more passive than active.  And in that passivity comes the presence to spring into action when needed, asked or required.  Being a potted plant mother is not my most favorite, or is it?

My house is a lot neater and cleaner which makes me way happier than I care to admit.  My life is pretty routine and boring.  I talk to the cats a lot.  I see myself walking around my house talking to the animals and think, “good thing your kids can’t see you now, they would require you to put a deposit down on an old folks home!”  But life is content, and orderly and much, much quieter.

So me and the kids change again.  Logan is out. Riley is out. Grace is almost out. It is just me again. Which feels so weird.  I feel absolutely nothing like the person I was before I became a mother.  I am so fundamentally rearranged and changed.  And I have been so consumed with the tasks, the grind and the obsession of motherhood for more than 20 years, I really have absolutely no idea who I am now which has been very hard to admit...

I am spending a great deal more time with my mother which has been a godsend.  She and I dining with each other weekly and going on vacation together.  Our daily chats the lifeblood and ballast to this time where my kids are launching, my dad has passed and she and I are left to live our lives without all the chaos and confusion that comes from being a daily tasked mother...

It is a weird time. Not a bad time, I just feel like I have felt the whole time.  Like I am being asked and required to know how to do things that I do not have any idea how to know and do.  I feel like I am supposed to know more, have better skills and knowledge, and I just don’t.  I am winging it, as I always have. Hoping for the best and praying that I don’t fuck this all up too much.

I guess today I can relish in the fact that they are all alive and relatively functional.  I am alive and relatively functional as well.  Perhaps that is the best evidence of mothering done well enough...the kids and I still talk, love each other and are free to explore that which is next for each of us. Some of it we like, and some of it we don’t.  The love remains but it has morphed again without my permission and consent and so it feels like going back in time would save us all from whatever awaits us next...but we cannot go back.  We can only move forward, each of us at our own pace. Each of us having our own cadence and rhythm...

It has taken me a very long time to realize that which should have been evident to me much sooner in this whole mothering adventure:  we were all growing up together.  It wasn’t just the kids, I was growing up too.  And as they moved through different stages, so did I.  I am not sure why I never realized this before.  I wasn’t this finished mother identity the whole time, I too, was a work in progress the entire time which includes right now today.

None of us know what we are doing, not the kids and certainly not me.  And I am pretty sure my own mother would agree that she is still winging it 56 years later.  I guess today as I embark on my 21st mother’s day of being a mother, I wish I would have seen this all as a grand growing adventure way earlier in the process.  I wish I would have been able to see that my own growth and change was a necessary part of my kids' growth and change. Instead, I always felt like I was supposed to be this static, unchanging presence in their lives.  But I wasn’t.  I was right there with them growing, changing, faltering, lousing it up, fixing it and beginning again.

And now I know that this is always the ask of motherhood: begin again, still...