I’m 26 now…I will be 27 next month. Now that I am a mother, I realize what that means for MY mom. It means that for 26, almost 27 years, she has constantly worried about me…If she did a good job, if she’s doing a good job now, if I love her, if I hate her, if I tell her the truth, if I lie to her, if I am happy, if I am healthy, if I am safe. She worries about everything. I know that because I do it now. And I know that because she tells me.
Every once in a while, my mom will get sentimental and she will ask me….”Lindsay, did I do a good job raising you? Were you a happy child?” All I can say to her is “shut up Mom.” And I say it with the highest respect. I say it because of course she did a good job. No, I wasn’t a happy child most of the time, but that was because kids are cruel and they constantly ridiculed me and tried their hardest to hurt me. Grade school was so bad, in fact, that I actually don’t even remember most of it. I have blocked out almost every memory of grade school and even a lot of Intermediate school because the children I went to school with her wretched creatures who were happy to see me cry…happy to see me hurt…happy to bring me down so that they could lift themselves up.
I do remember some times from those years, though. I remember the Happy times. It’s strange, though…almost all of those times, my mom was there. She was there dancing with me in our living room while we played the Locomotion on our old-school record player. (Kids made fun of me for not having a CD player, but at that time, I had no desire for a CD player….records were way better for fun!) She was there wrestling with me and sometimes even letting me win….We wrestled just for fun because my mom was a silly woman and I was a silly kid. Some of my greatest memories are the simplest memories. Mom brushing my hair after bathtime and blow drying it so gently that it didn’t really even hurt, even though my head was super sensitive back then. Mom cleaning my little ears is probably the most relaxing thing in the whole wide world. (If you’ve ever cleaned a child’s ears, you know how nerve-wracking it is for the cleaner trying to make sure you’re not hurting the cleanee.)
My mom always wonders if she did a good job raising me….The tears welling in my eyes as I write about all of these wonderful memories with her tells me that she clearly did a great job raising me. The fact that there were some less-than-wonderful people in our lives does not change that. My mom was, is and always will be my Mommy. I hope she realizes that and I hope she stops questioning her parenting…Even though I know that won’t happen. I know that because I’m a mom now. I only hope that my children have some of these same wonderful memories of me that I have of my mom.
Visiting from Mama Kat’s. Beautiful post, and what a tribute to your mom! You’re so right–you can’t understand your mother’s feelings for you until you become a mother yourself, and then all of a sudden you see her in a new light.
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What a beautiful post. Hooray for mothers and the legacy they’ve left us!
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This is a beautiful post. It’s so nice that you have good memories and it sounds like you and your mom love each other very much. Lovely.
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What an awesome post!! I’m working on one for Sunday about my mom
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And you can post on my weight loss blog carnival for up to a week after each post! It’s still open if you want
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