Lessons learned and lessons taught for Mother’s Day
By Sally Friedman
”Just wait until you have children of your own…”
How many times I’d uttered that famous line when one of my daughters tested me to my limits — when I honestly thought the only answer for me was to walk away and let them fend for themselves.
And if you’re a mother, you know exactly what I mean.
I never did run off and join the circus, as I threatened to do when I thought one more cry of “I HATE HER!” would be my last. I did, however, slam doors and raise my voice in ways that I swore I never would before I had kids.
And just when each of our girls seemed to be emerging from the long, twisted tunnel of coming-of-age female, it was time for them to leave us. Figures, right?
Off they marched into their young adult lives, and to my amazement, they didn’t do the crazy, dangerous irresponsible things I was sure they would.
They did travel to places I wouldn’t have.
They did occasionally bring home young men I found unappealing at best, downright awful at worst. Thankfully, they didn’t marry them.
And for a while there, I didn’t have many occasions to utter those words about “children of your own.” Then, in turn, Jill, Nancy and Amy became mothers. And everything changed in an instant.
Suddenly, these daughters, once so sure, so confident and willful, became putty in the tiny hands of their babies. I watched from the sidelines as they surrendered to creatures no bigger than a sack of flour.
Jill, the public defender who could defend heinous criminals without batting an eyelash, wept bitter tears for weeks when her infant daughter refused to follow the script and breast feed contentedly. Not even veteran lactation counselors, unheard of in my day, could solve the problem.
As a mother, Jill felt like a failure. And failure was a bitter pill to swallow, yet one all of us who mother eventually experience. We are not, alas, as wise and omnipotent as we’d like to be, and those reminders begin almost as soon as that cry rings out in the delivery room/birthing suite.
Amy could conquer the dog-eat-dog corporate world and walk those mean streets of Manhattan with bounce in her step. But getting through Baby Emily’s first night of screaming without apparent cause was another story.
Amy was undone. Powerless. And like her own mother decades before, Amy ultimately collapsed in a heap and let Emily cry it out. It was, she later told me, the longest night of her life.
Nancy is living her own version of “My Three Sons” with appropriate humility. She now knows that her credentials as a psychologist vanish in thin air when Sam or Jonah or even little Danny figures out some ingenious way to make her lose all that rational control she thought she’d surely have.
But the combined mischief quotient of Nancy’s sons far surpasses her hard-won pedigree, and this daughter who deftly solves other people’s problems faces the sobering fact that like the rest of us, she sometimes can’t solve her own.
Kids do that to us. They’re geniuses at keeping us humble. And vulnerable, too.
My daughters knew exactly which buttons to push to turn me into a raving lunatic. And they pushed them regularly… just as I did with my mother. The cycle is endless and somewhere along the way, we mothers utter those immortal words, “Just wait…”
But there’s a flip side to that coin. And I devour it in great, proud gulps.
My daughters have turned out to be better mothers than I ever was. They read more, know more, and came to motherhood older and wiser than I had. They struggle to give their kids happy good mornings and safe goodnights every day of their lives, and most days they succeed.
So in this Mother’s Day season, as we Friedman women celebrate being mothers together, I’ll pause sometime in the midst of the mayhem to look around and think “Look at this! Look at these daughters of mine.”
And on this, or any Mother’s Day, that will be my most profound and precious gift.