Love, Lessons and Lingering Emotions

Mother’s Day may be over, but the emotions it stirs tend to linger long after the flowers wilt and the greeting cards are tossed away.

For many of us, thoughts of our mothers come wrapped in contradiction. Love and frustration. Gratitude and resentment. Laughter and guilt. Maybe what unsettles us most is not just the woman who raised us, but the woman we became while trying to understand her—or while trying to be a mother ourselves.

What words come to mind when I think of my mother? Loving? Domineering? Sensitive? Cold? Submissive? Strong? Bewildering? Joyful? Frustrating? Funny? Guilty?

Truthfully, at one time or another, probably all of them. And if I’m honest, those same words could describe me as a stepmother.

It took me years to realize my mother did the best she could with what she knew at the time. The harder lesson was admitting that I did, too.

Would I change some of the words I said—or the ones I swallowed? Absolutely. Age gives us a different view of old battles. Looking back, situations that once felt like emotional earthquakes now seem almost predictable. Hormones, exhaustion, fear, hunger, insecurity and plain old stubbornness were often conducting the orchestra.

At twenty, thirty-two, or even fifty, I was reacting to whatever chaos was playing loudest that day. My emotional soundtrack could shift without warning—from anger to joy, from laughter to tears, from dancing in the kitchen to crying in the laundry room.

Some days, I felt like I was spinning the dial on an old radio, spinning from one station to another, never quite finding clear reception.

As a daughter, I was listening to one kind of music while my mother was hearing an entirely different tune. No wonder we often missed each other’s rhythm.

Then came motherhood—or stepmotherhood—and I discovered the children in my life were dancing to songs I had never even heard before.

Nothing prepares you for the realization that love does not automatically create understanding.

Motherhood is complicated. Daughterhood may be worse. But as the child of a woman who was gloriously human, I find myself both grateful and annoyed by what she taught me. Thankful for the lessons, irritated by the methods. Delighted by some of the roads we traveled, and still wondering why we had to take the scenic route through some of the others.

Still, what adventures we had. What lessons we shared. What stories remain. My hope is that all those detours, wrong turns and emotional potholes did not do permanent damage to either of us—but if they did, at least they gave us something worth writing about.

Another slice of life—burnt edges and all.