The Musings of a Mother for Mother's Day

1974 My first child

“If you bungle raising children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.”  Jacqueline Kennedy

When I had my first child I suddenly knew that life as I knew it was over.  I wondered why no one had told me this and why I wasn’t prepared.  Nor was I prepared for the immense outpouring of love that I felt for this new life and that it couldn’t compare with any other feelings I had experienced.

Being a mother is not easy, even in the best of households, or the richest.  There is no playbook yet there is an overabundance of directions and/or suggestions from well meaning sources that often contradict each other and add to the mix of confusion.

 When my world was full of little people that I had to protect, provide for and ensure their safety at all costs, my modus operandi was control all situations in every aspect.  When it became clear I could not in all honesty control every situation, my motto became “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”  I felt ill prepared and definitely out of control.  I bemoaned that I was the worst mother in the world.  I would lament little things like:  “How could I buy a pair of shoes too big for my small child to save money only to watch him fall as soon as he got into the parking lot, tripping over those cost saving shoes and getting a nasty bump on his head?”  Certainly that was not the only mistake I made.

There were way too many bumps in the road for my liking, too many pitfalls, too many roller coaster rides. It became clear eventually that the best I could do was make good citizens out of my children, teach them right from wrong and, again, hope for the best.  

For my nuclear family, things were not easy, in fact, we would joke that our family fit the description of dysfunctional when that became a new word in the dictionary.  I could only hope that when I came to the end of this road my children had survived me and were happy and still loved me. 

People would ask me how I did it and my answer was always the same.  “I really don’t know, I just do it.”  But that’s our job, God gave us a task and we must complete that task.  

When I came across this Jacqueline Kennedy quote, it hit home.  As a mother, we have one job, one job to do and that job is to raise our children.  That is our first and foremost responsibility above all other responsibilities.  Most of us just know that.

My children are all on their own now and I am proud of them.  I hope they know how much I love them and that I wouldn’t be without a one of them.  

I think of my own mother and how she treated me.  I was a hopeless wanderer who may or may not have been the black sheep of the family.  I was passionate about the wrong things and I cared for the wrong people.  After 20 years I waltzed back home with all sorts of troubling issues.  My mother had never given up on me and she took me in without question or judgment.  For the next 10 years we talked on the phone daily and were never far from each other.  I now cherish those memories.

I took pages from her playbook and used them for my own.  I wonder sometimes if she knew how much I appreciated her.  I hope so.