Happy Birthday, Mom

Why are mothers so difficult?

Or, why was a relationship with my mother so darn difficult?

Answers remain mystifying, confusing, frustrating, and convoluted.

My mother’s birthday is this week. She died 20 years ago, but as the date of her birth rises on the horizon of memories, I contemplate why there was conflict, peace, trauma, and periods of no obvious emotional links between us.

My limited insight doesn’t visualize the bond that ties love, anger, power, order, closeness and distance, into such a sensitive and contradicting connection.

Of course, I was a perfect child. Mother just didn’t know it.

Of course, she was a perfect Mother…until she wasn’t.

So, how do we explain the role that unites us while fighting to break away from the knots of connectedness?

My mother was a complex creature, while I was simple. Then I became complex and mother was an uninformed simpleton.

Oh, the swing of emotions and perspectives I have exhibited from birth to my current 82 years about my mother.

She was everything to me, guiding, leading, instructing, reprimanding, protecting, loving me.

Then she became bossy, unforgiving, unloving, controlling, and clearly not understanding.

And suddenly she became needy, easier, softer, more pliable.

Did she change that much or did I just see her with a different set of lenses? Did she make an attempt to inform me, but I couldn’t hear her voice, nor understand her message? And if I thought I was confused about her, she must have been just as bumfuzzled about me, my decisions, my perspectives, my desires.

She died soon after my 61st birthday, and by that time, we were able to laugh about my oddities and her quirks. I’m not certain we were ever completely honest with one another, but we forged a relationship that seemed to satisfy each of us. I guess we both compromised about what we wanted in a relationship and reached an unspoken peace treaty.

I will be forever grateful to my mother for the gifts she gave me, and the ones she didn’t think I needed to learn. She showed me how to work by requiring me to deliver papers and to scrub bathrooms. She taught me how to accomplish goals by expecting me to finish projects I didn’t like.

She skipped the lessons on sewing and cooking understanding I would never master them. She pushed me to be independent, and she allowed me a great deal of freedom, probably because she forgot I existed. She taught me generosity and loyalty, remembering to always send gifts to her former mother-in-law, thank you notes for kind acts, and baby gifts to friends’ new-born grandchildren.

She was my perfect, imperfect, strange, strong, determined, difficult and complex Mother.

Happy Birthday, Betty Belle.And thanks for the many gifts you gave me, whether I wanted them or not.