Mother’s Day

Here’s what I want to say for Mother’s Day. Motherhood isn’t just one thing. And by that I don’t really mean the broad diversity of ways of being a mother, including step moms, foster moms, moms who placed babies for adoption, grandmas raising grandbabies, dads who are primary parents, important friends and neighbors and teachers and coaches who raise up kids who aren’t their own, etc. etc. Although Lord knows that’s important, and deserves to be said.

But what I’m thinking about this Mother’s Day is that motherhood itself is never just one thing. The darling baby that you rock and snuggle and kiss adoringly in the middle of the night is the same baby who induced a wave of frustration and despair and—let’s just say it—rage when she woke you, squalling, from the first uninterrupted three hours of sleep you’d had in a week. The kid whose soccer pictures you proudly share on Facebook also refuses to take a shower in spite of the fact that he stinks to high heaven. Or you are trying to figure out how to express your pride that your teen got a GED or a job bagging groceries when your friends are bragging about how their kids have gotten into Ivy League schools—at the same time that you are both embarrassed and ashamed of your embarrassment.

It isn’t one thing. It’s pride and despair and fierce love and fierce anger and utter bewilderment. How is it that a toddler who can run in circles for hours on end can’t manage to walk across a parking lot? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. It’s all a mystery. We take total strangers, whether they come from our own bodies or not, and invite them into the center of our hearts and the center of our lives for as long as we both shall live. Without the option of divorce. And sometimes it’s glorious and sometimes it is indescribable sweetness and sometimes it’s flat out terrifying and there are stretches that are mind-bogglingly dull. (Candyland? Again? Really?) This morning my teenager surprised me with a thoughtful Mother’s Day gift, purchased with her own money from her own job and offered in love. Half an hour later she refused to clean up the mess she left in the kitchen. It isn’t ever one thing.

So I just wanted to say that if you are, at this moment, basking in the glow of the love of your beautiful family, I think that is awesome, and you totally deserve it. And if you are mourning the fact that you never had the children that you longed for, I totally understand, and you deserve space and time to cry. But if, it this very moment, you are ready to join a religious order—without regard for what religion it might be—just so long as it promises six hours of silence a day, I get that. I really, really do. And that feeling is no less a genuine part of the complicated, bewildering, unrelenting and frequently bizarre process of being a parent than the moments of rosy glow.

A friend recently proudly displayed a new coffee mug, which said, in large letters: “WORLD’S OKAYEST MOM.” That seems like a good goal. Not only that we be satisfied with being OK moms, since there’s not even a standard description for what truly excellent parenting looks like. I think that we could also aim for being okay with how we are doing; with how our kids are doing; with knowing that whatever the bliss or crisis of the moment, it isn’t the whole picture. And that parenthood, whatever form it might take, is never simple, never just one thing.