They drive me crazy

Two is not always better than one. But it's hard to stay mad at those faces.

Motherhood means sometimes having to say you're sorry

This post was written not only for Girls Gone Child call for good mothers but also for the PBN blog blast - in conjunction with Light Iris - "What makes you a mother?" Go to either PBN or Light Iris to find out how you can enter to win a fabulous prize.

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There we sat that evening, my mother and me, a year or two before she died, in one of those pop-up, camper-trailers. We were parked in the middle of a college running track, our designated spot for our Relay for Life team. With us that night was my sister, Mom's boyfriend, and a couple of her closest friends. Our small group sat in the dark, our emotions already running high from all that was going on outside the zip-up walls of the camper, and we talked. We talked not like a mother and her friends would with her children, but as adults. We shared stories, laughed at past foibles, and gossiped. We offered details about ourselves that, if not for the intimate setting and the perceived safety that darkness offers, we might have never shared.

As often happened when my mom and I were together our chatter led us to reminiscing about my tumultuous teen years. It was a saga I was tired of hearing; how I was a little shit and caused my poor, suffering mother years of frustration and pain.

The abridged version for those of you who care: From the age of 12 to 17 my mother and I, more alike than we wanted to admit, were at war. The details aren't important. The bottom line is we both wanted control of my life and neither was willing to give an inch. She was over-protective to a fault and I did more than my fair share of testing the limits of my boundaries.

As far as my relationship with my mother is concerned I wouldn't do much to change those years. I was, after all, a teenager learning to be independent. And she was a mother struggling with the maturation of her first born. Neither one of us knew what the hell we were doing.

But that night... I don't know if it was her advancing illness, her sense of mortality, or the intimacy of the setting, but instead of poking fun of the 16 year old me my mother, the woman who had tried to keep me pinned down like a butterfly in a shadow box- presumably for my own good - apologized to me.

I think it is safe to say that there won't be many moments in my life as profound as the night my mother told me she was sorry for not always doing the right thing when it came to raising me. How many of you have heard an apology like that from your parents? Yeah, those four or five years when all we did was fight and all the tears we shed and the months we spent not talking? I royally screwed up. Sorry about that.

Those weren't the words she used, of course, but I don't really remember what her exact words were. I remember looking to her friend for confirmation. My eyes said, Did I really just hear my mother tell me she was wrong? Her friend nodded in agreement. They had obviously talked about this before.

My mother felt she was wrong and she was sorry.

She wasn't wrong, however. She made some big mistakes but they were all in my best interest. I wasn't wrong, either. Because of my mother's apology I know that now. I was a young, stupid kid filled with hormones. But to hear this woman who had held such power over me admit that she made mistakes, took the wrong stance, was unfair at times... that really knocked me for a loop. It didn't set things right entirely but it changed how I viewed our relationship.

Now I'm the mother and I screw up all the time. If there's a hard and fast right way to parent I haven't found it yet, so I'm bound to make more and that's just the way it is. I'm not infallible and I'm learning to live with that. Hell, I'm learning to embrace that fact. Just because I have some pretty stupid lapses in reason does not make me a bad mother. If I can learn from those mistakes it will, eventually, make me a damn good mother. And it didn't make my mom a bad mother, either. I mentioned before that she wasn't the best but she was pretty damn good. She had to have been or I wouldn't have turned out as well as I did.

Before she died my Mom gave me a few very important gifts, one being that apology. I was finally able to see my mother as the fragile person she was and that made me feel so empowered. Not because I saw her as weak but because she had the strength to admit that she was flawed. She was a mother and there is no place for perfection in motherhood. In that moment, when she let go and dropped her guard, she taught me what she couldn't all those years before. Life is not about hiding from what scares us, it's about making mistakes. How else do we learn?

One day, when she's old enough to understand, I will begin telling my daughter that I make mistakes. Not just small ones but big gaffes. I don't want her to wait until she's thirty, after she's lived decades questioning herself and her choices. I want her to know that I mess up but that I try to learn from every misstep and poor decision. I want her to know that all good mothers do. I'm human. I'm a mother, a good mother, and those mistakes will help me be the best mother I can be.

God is in the details

The season of Lent, for me, will always symbolize a season of sacrifice. During Lent Christians are asked to fast and abstain from certain wordly pleasures, such as meat or alcohol. As young children attending Catholic elementary school we were encouraged to give up something that we loved for the forty (some odd) days between Ash Wednesday and Easter. It would make us stronger Catholics, we were told, we would be closer to Jesus who made the ultimate sacrifice for us. It was not uncommon for adults to model this behavior for their children to make the concession easier, or because they too grew up with the same custom. Personally, I always thought it was a waste of my time.

Every year during Lent my mother, the good Catholic she was, would give up her very favorite thing in the world - Chocolate. She would pack up her boxes of hand made chocolates - gifts left over from Christmas, oftentimes - and boxes of Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies and no taste of the sweet would pass her lips. On Easter day my grandmother would put out a large plate of chocolates and only then would my mother indulge. She had proven she could let go of such earthly trappings and now she could celebrate. And celebrate she did in a great orgy of milk chocolates.

My mother led a fairly clean existence - she did not drink, had given up smoking in the 70s, and did not particularly care for gourmet food - so giving up chocolate was a huge sacrifice for her. One year, in 1995, I asked my mother why she continued to give up her chocolate for Lent. What was the purpose? Instead of answering me she instead challenged me to give up something. She questioned if I could be so dedicated. I had long since denounced my place in the Catholic church and it had been years since I had given up anything for Lent (and if we're being honest, even when I tried to I usually failed and gave in about a week before Easter), but I love a challenge. So I gave up that which I had held, still hold, so dear.

I gave up coffee.

It may not seem like a lot and, really, it shouldn't have been too hard. I was only 22 years old and the monkey on my back was still in its infancy. I had worked for years in a coffee shop but it was only since my senior year in college that I had become a slave for the java.

However...

The year before I had taken a job at a local radio station and in the few months before Lent of that year I had been given a position as part of the morning drive-time team. That meant I had to be at work, awake and perky, to be on the air for 5:45am. I usually set my alarm to wake me up by 4:30am.

Half past four in the morning. With no coffee. I'm feeling queasy just thinking about it.

It became a topic of conversation every day during the show. My two on-air co-hosts started laying bets as to when I would finally cave in. I would show up to work and there, at my seat next to my microphone, would be a large, steaming, fragrant cup of coffee. I was low man on the totem pole so during long breaks in the show they would send me across the street to get coffee for them. It became our shtick. When would she finally crack?

But I didn't.

The first week was hell - I was an addict giving up her fix, after all - the headaches were horrible and my personality changed. I was irritable and nasty, which were things I had to hide while on air. And can you imagine not wanting to kill someone who was trying to tempt you with coffee at 6 o'clock in the morning? It was a nightmare. But as the weeks went on it got easier and I started to feel better. When Easter finally - finally! - came I was able to get up and go without my legal drug of choice. I had beaten that monkey into submission. I had proven that I could sacrifice something. My coworkers were in awe of me. Our ten listeners (we were a really small station) congratulated me. My mother was impressed.

That was enough for me.

Like my mother I went back to my vice after Easter of that year, but I seriously cut back my overall caffeine consumption. To this day I only allow myself one, maybe two, cups of coffee a day. And every year during Lent, I think of the time that I proved to my mom - if not to a God that I wasn't sure I believed in - that I could make a sacrifice. It had nothing to do with Christ or Christianity and everything to do with impressing my mother. This time of year that morning cup of joe tastes better, more earned and less needed, and I consider doing it again. Maybe I'll give up coffee again, maybe chocolate, or maybe something else entirely. But with no one I believe in laying down a challenge I doubt that I will.