On motherhood

                                                

Last Sunday was Mother's Day, of course, a day that we observed by wandering through Historic Downtown Quito and the beautiful Quito Botanical Gardens with our former nanny, Julie, who is visiting us this week (hooray!). We are now back in La Josefina, showing Julie our sweet home. 

Today, we truncated our homeschool day so that we could sneak in a trip to the finca and a dip in the river before the afternoon rains. Jonah is quietly playing with Legos, Brynna is flitting back and forth from the neighbor's house playing imaginatively with a few local boys, and Dillon is on the front porch, doing math homework and birdwatching. Our soundtrack is the unceasing drumming of the elementary and middle school students practicing for an upcoming parade.

Amazingly, I  have found a few minutes to reflect on motherhood, albeit interrupted by the demonstration of a very cool Lego soccer field, an appeal to  try to fix The Incredible Hulk's broken arm (I was unsuccessful), and multiple requests for goldfish, which Julie brought as a special treat.

Motherhood is so many things: an amazing, rewarding, trying, taxing role with no script; a difficult job that reasonably should require years of training but comes with none; a gift that is utterly un-returnable (thank goodness). As my dear friend, Brooke, astutely warned me during her family's year in Panama, "You know, no matter where you are in the world, you are mostly just parenting your children."

Truth. 

Here, in this tiny Ecuadorian village, during this privileged year of leisure and adventure, without work responsibilities and other pressures of our "normal" life, I am mostly a mom doing mom things: cooking my kids breakfast, putting cream on their rashes, reading them books, asking them to bring their plates to the sink, correcting their irreverent behaviors, and singing to them each night in their beds.

I know that this uninterrupted time together is invaluable. I also know it is short -- that, while I have many decades ahead of me to be a mother --  my children's actual childhood is short. I feel Dillon beginning to stretch his wings, and I am grateful even for interrupted sleep on the rare occasion I find him in bed with me  -- as he was last night with a tummy ache.

I love my children, even if I do not always like them.  I love their trust in me and in the endless possibilities of the world around them, their tender spots, their vulnerabilities, their fresh perspectives. I love their strengths and their weaknesses, their creativities, their brutal honesty. I love their giggles and their tears. 

I love being their mom. I love that they came through my imperfect body into this world. That their little beating hearts once beat inside my womb. That they fed from my breasts. That remnants of them still literally float in my bloodstream. 

I even love them when they fight over apple slices, when they play too rough and accuse one another of maleficence, when they complain about the food I tenderly prepared for them, when they vehemently protest my perfectly reasonable request that they brush their teeth and get ready for bed.

I do not like their whining. I do not like their bickering. I do not like their selective hearing. I do not like their resistance. I do not like their temper tantrums.  But, even still, I love them so! 

To be sure, I do not love myself so completely as I love them. I do not appreciate my own tender spots, my own vulnerabilities, my own challenges in the same way.  I just don't. And yet, in those moments in which I fall short in loving myself, I am grateful for the earthly presence of my own mother, who while failing cognitively, still loves me emphatically. As former UUCSR minister Rev. Chris Bell once remarked about his own mother, "She has always been my greatest fan."

Thanks, mom, for always being my greatest fan.

When I doubt myself, when I fall short, when I falter, I conjure my own mother, and I find strength. I find strength in her unremitting faith in me. I find strength in her love of me. I find strength in her hope for me.

I love that it is my turn now to be my kids' greatest fan. I love the notion that nothing -- or practically nothing -- can take me away from being in their life-stands, cheering them on, encouraging them after a fall, congratulating them after a success, reminding them that they CAN do it. I am well aware that many people have experienced their own mothers falling short in this role, that they have felt unsupported, judged, or deemed not enough, that they were even harmed by their expectations.  I am well aware that this is not always an easy part to play.

And yet I also learned from my mom that high expectations are acceptable, that asking my children to rise up, to do right by themselves and by others is not asking too much, and that with my unconditional support, they can become the people they want to be. 

I do not aspire to be perfect.

I aspire to combat my own judgements. I aspire to temper my own visions for my children in order to ensure that they become the happy, kind, and successful humans that they envision themselves to be. I aspire to support them in good times and in bad. I aspire to be their greatest enthusiast. Let's hope I can do it; and when I doubt myself, may I forever call upon my own mother's unabating support to sustain me in these aspirations.