Mothering2

After reading the comments to my post, and talking to several friends about their reaction to what I wrote last week, my thoughts have expanded, or moved in other directions.  When I began to write the memoir, I truly thought I had had an unhappy childhood because of my mother’s heart attack,  which happened when I was four.  Much to my surprise, when I forced myself to picture the house we had lived in during my formative years, I remembered my mom bundling up my sister and me to take us outside in the first snow I ever saw. She let me help her pack the snow into a huge round body, and then ran inside for a carrot and raisins for the nose, eyes and mouth.  Her excitement at what we were doing was contagious.  It felt the same when she would sit behind me on the slide and scream with joy all the way down to the bottom.  It isn’t that I wanted to change my long-held feelings about my childhood, but rather that what I found myself remembering altered them as I wrote.  The last piece of information.  A high school friend was telling me recently that she liked coming to my house after school because she hated going home, but my mom was scary.  My mom?!  She told me that once I had left a book I was reading on the couch, face down and open, and my mom ‘reamed me out’ about it.  I don’t remember that at all, but it gave me food for thought.  I know she was judgmental, but don’t remember her yelling at me much.  I still leave my book open on the couch, and wince when I move to bookmark, and close it!  So now I have more to revisit, even though I completed “Little Nancy” several years ago. I am actually looking forward to plumbing my own depths.  Maybe I am compelled to do everything well because she might judge me poorly if I don’t, and she has been dead for over twenty years.  What seems important to me as both a daughter and a mother, is to create the most complete picture of our moms, as well as ourselves as mothers, to free ourselves from beliefs that no longer serve us.  I want to see my mother as all that she was.  And I want to see myself that way as well.  Someday, hopefully, my daughters will too.  That ‘seeing’ comes with age, so I may not be around to see it, but I trust them both to take this journey.  After all, I am their mother.