“Look at you – you’re just like your mother.”
Weren’t those dreaded words at one point in my life? Didn’t I work all these years to not be like her, to identify her faults and weaknesses and to do everything humanly possible to avoid them?
I read a comic strip once in which a woman was lamenting the fact that she’d turned into her mother. All the behaviors she hated, she’d adopted. And I heard once that if a man wants to know what his wife will be like in 30 years, he should look at her mother. It was meant to be mean.
Why now, then, am I desperately wishing for that one profound gift that eludes me – to be like my mom? I think it’s because I’m a mother now myself, and I’m beginning to wonder if I could ever hope to be the mother she has been to me.
My mom had six children. She took care of the kids and the husband and the money and everything else involved in keeping eight difficult people happy together in a house with one bathroom. She stood by us all through the rebellion, the growing pains, the flight, the anger, the fear. She never wavered, and she never walked away.
She wanted nothing for me but the best, giving me everything I needed to succeed in life, seemingly effortlessly. She indulged my intelligence even if she didn’t understand it; she left me to my moods to figure out the secrets of life, when she knew them all along; she let me run away when I needed to flee, and come home when I needed to rest. She held me when I lost, and held me when I won.
My mom is patient and loving and trusting, and I thought that was bad. She is devoted, and I thought her weak. She has an implicit faith and almost spiritual innocence usually reserved for children, and I thought her naïve.
And she has a commitment to her husband, her children and her life that, unbelievably, I found limited. She is secure and beautiful and strong, and I misread it all.
What I mistook for weakness was the most profound patience and ability to forgive that I have ever witnessed. I thanked her by doing every possible wrong thing, taking every possible wrong turn, learning every possible lesson the hard way, almost daring her to turn away from me. She never did.
What I mistook for naivete was, in fact, the kind of unquestioning faith in God and in others that I now envy. I thanked her by not believing in anything, not even myself. Yet she never doubted me.
What I mistook for cowardice was the kind of strength that can topple empires. She never ran from life’s challenges, even when I thought maybe she should. She weathered each and every storm like the beacon she is, teaching me in the process the true meaning of commitment. I thanked her by treating commitment as a disease.
I’ve done everything in my power to not become my mother, because I thought that was how it was supposed to be. But I’ve done too good a job, because I now fear that I’ll never develop the patience, the faith, the loyalty, the honesty and the strength that have become her trademarks. Everything I rebelled against is everything for which I now yearn.
This is an apology for every doubt, every silent criticism, every time I promised myself I wouldn’t do that, think like that, believe that, be like that. I just didn’t know then what I know now, and I just didn’t understand. Now I understand, and I want nothing more than to do, think, believe and be like her.
I now look forward to the day when someone tells me I’m just like my mother. And I’m really hoping it will be her.