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I did not enter motherhood with any sort of grace or nobility. Motherhood, with its strange delightful horrors, permeated every part of my life from the time I was just a little girl.

Wikipedia offers two basic definitions of a mother. One is “biological” or “social female parent of a child”. The next is what even Wiki calls the “stereotypical traits of a mother such as nurturing and other-centredness.” At this stage in life, nearly 23 years old, I have yet to find the mother of the latter definition. That is to say, some one who hugs and loves without asking why you need it, some one who automatically assumes they are to give and sacrifice for you, some one never stops you when you want to vent, even gossip, to get things off your chest. This person, with whatever faults they come with, is still personal. Maybe they aren’t all warm and apple pie, maybe so. But because of the length of time they have been your mother; the situations they’ve gone through with you; the books they read to you when you were little and the fights you had as a teenager, they are yours.

My mother-in-law, who was more ready to embrace me once we were connected through blood by her first grandson, would admit, or rather state, that it takes her awhile to warm up to people. She wasn’t the southern gal who wanted everybody to call her “Mama” while she poured you a cup of extra sweet tea and invited you to be part of her family. However, she is what you see is what you get. She stands by, with advice and help; with friendship. Though at times I think our entire world views are from opposite sides of the planet, she has shown me what a disciplined, careful, accomplished and fairly consistent woman and mother looks like. She is inspiring to me, and not many “mothers” in my life can say that. I also get the unique seating position of watching her around her son, my husband, so learning all the while a few more pieces to the motherhood fiasco. 

My step-mother was just the opposite. I was working in a coffee shop, 18 years old, when my dad’s long-distance girlfriend came for a visit and popped into meet me. She came straight up to me, laid her hand on top of my own, and with an enormous twinkle in her eye told me how nice it was to meet me. She’s the kind of person who makes a cliché statement like that seem like you won the Noble Peace Prize. I liked her immediately, and knew she was a good match for my father. She hadn’t been married to my dad but a year when I asked her if I could call her “mom”. Still, when she moved in I was heading out to college. It wasn’t until my first pregnancy a few years later that we began to connect more closely, as we had similar birthing philosophies and in the end, she was one of my labor coaches. She held my leg while I pushed, which is such a perfect image of relationships: messy, strenuous, cathartic. Hers and mine are no exception. In ways puzzling to me, we manage to find ourselves in pickles. I’m always the one back-peddling. I spend restless nights feeling like a little girl, worrying that I was too vulnerable with this woman, wondering whether or not I have it in me to work on the relationship at all. My tendency, my preference, with relationships that turn sticky is to cut and run. Only my husband has the kind of devotion and love that comes any where near unconditional- and he thinks it’s annoying. Friends and family do not enjoy his privilege, or curse, however you want to look at it. I say that because at times I have to ask myself if people, particularly mothers, are trying to shake me off, brush me away, and I’m that kid, that needy poor kid who doesn’t get the hint. So they pick fights with me in order to sever the relationship, because they must know that every instinct in me during a brawl is to say, “Sorry, too hard. I’m out.”

Case in point: my biological mother. I spent years not returning her phone calls. Years.  I probably wouldn’t return her phone call were she to call today. With such a complicated relationship, I don’t have enough space to go into it too deeply. What I’ll say is that wherever she fell short, wherever she made a mistake – and there were plenty, the Technicolor kind – I felt it my duty to counter her mistake with my own good choices. Like I was taking it upon myself to balance the universe, tit for tat. It was easy to do, I had a fairly clean slate; I choose to avoid the Technicolor sins of drinking, smoking and sex. I stuck with self-righteousness, gossip, self-loathing – you get the picture. To this day my birth mother’s attempts at a relationship with me are flucked up, (yes, with an “L” cause I need the emphasis without the potty mouth), by my inability to handle her mess. As if it were some how bigger than any one else’s, especially my own. It is one of those situations where I throw my hands up to God and call in a grace card. And hope that some day I will know what to do with it.

In addition to these, there have been women who have added their side dishes of motherhood onto the table for me to feast. They’ll be in my book some day: Jo, who always had a cup of red wine with her dinner, who always let the rest of the house sleep in on Saturday mornings while she cleaned and listened to opera; Loretta, with her fiery Italian tongue, new diets each year, and Christian values; Henderson, the least handicapped handicap person I know. Did they catch me, their kid’s friend, studying them; learning from every encounter just what it is mother’s do; making mental lists of recipes, traditions and routines?

These women, together with various TV moms, combined to form my Modge Podge mother figure. She’s a little lopsided, a little over the top, slightly quirky and unreal, but she’s what I’ve got. It’s not a wonder, then, that as I have become a mother, I see more and more of ol’ Mrs. Modge Podge in the mirror every day.   

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 6:29 am and is filed under Motherhood, Relatives