not my mother (way too long)

Sometimes we feel trapped by genetics: it doesn't matter what kind of person we would like to be, because we are basically some odd merger of our parents' traits.

Lately, I don't think that's true.

I have certain tendencies that remind me of my mother, for sure. The chief one being that I am basically selfish, which is the exact opposite of my middle sister. It's not that I never think of anyone else, it's that I just naturally gravitate towards pursuing my own agenda, and I have to really think about and make an effort to see to the kids' and what should be on their agendas.

But in me that's just a tendency, and not an ingrained personality trait the way it is for my mom.

Spending time with my mom I see how different we are. For example, when I read to DD, we snuggle together on the couch in the living room, and it's a special time. Mom reads to DD sitting in one chair by the desk in the family room, while DD sits in another, facing her. She can't see the book unless Mom turns it around for her to see. I hadn't really thought about this before, but now I'm thinking, that's just weird, and why does she do that? I remember when I was DD's age, Mom read me Johanna Spyri's Heidi... in the kitchen, each of us in our own hard kitchen chair, with me looking at her (or eyes wandering, more likely) while she read to me. How strange! Why wasn't I looking at the book? Why weren't we sitting next to each other, at least?

Then I realized that while Mom loves to hold and cuddle babies, after a certain age, it's like we got cut off from that coddling, as if we didn't need it any more. Of course she'd hug us if we fell and comfort us if we were sad, but the amount of random physical contact -- lap sitting, walking holding hands, sitting next to with arms around -- fell off dramatically.

I think that's why I loved sitting on the glider of our front porch so much. I could sit between my Mom and Dad and just feel them on both sides, and I didn't feel so isolated. It is weird to think of being alone or isolated as the youngest of 7 with people constantly around, but I definitely felt that way. Detached, at a very young age.

DS1 has finally reached the age where he pulls away from me when I hug him too long, or he'll drop my hand sometimes, but not always, if we're walking holding hands. But so far I still feel very connected, physically, to my kids, and I try every day to give hugs and kisses or tickles or hair-ruffles, some gentle touch which clearly conveys that I love them, and that there is nothing keeping us separate. All the medical trials keep me from playing with the kids as physically as I'd like to; the horseplay is pretty much DH's sole territory now, it just wears me out and since I've got a major incision healing, it would be stupid to rough-house. But I still wish I could, and I hope I can again, someday.

That willingness to rough-house is another thing my Mom lacks. I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm her last kid and she was just exhausted when she had me, but Mom just doesn't have all that much sense of humor. She's not completely serious, but she just doesn't "get" silly. I remember as a kid my Irish twin brother and I would sometimes "get the giggles," she'd call it, and it made her nuts. She detested it when we worked ourselves up to the point of laughing at everything. I can understand how that can be annoying, but sometimes, you should be able to laugh at everything. It's good for you.

Plus, it's such a downer for the kids to have a parent who constantly glares at you whenever you're being goofy. The ability to be goofy is a gift that most people don't appreciate. One of DH's most outstanding attributes (to me, anyway) is his ability to make me laugh, even when I'm all full of myself over something stupid. I know a lot of people would say that his humor is sophomoric (or worse), but hey -- I'm twelve, too, or at least my sense of humor's development was arrested around that time. (Case in point: I laughed so hard at Team America that my face hurt when I left the theater.)

So, at least I have more of a sense of humor than my mother, and I'm well into the territory where I can remember what she was like when she was my age now, so I'm not just taking today's state and projecting it backwards: she has always been like this, at least with us kids, as far as I can remember. I occasionally get the impression that with her peers she was a lot different.

That may be the key, this generational thing. Because there is a huge difference in the respect my mother has for me, and the respect I have for my kids. Mom has backed off on the control freak thing a lot over the years, but she'll still occasionally lapse and tell me how to do something I've been doing for 30 years, like make a cup of tea. I'm not kidding, she's that kind of Mom: there's one way to do things, her way, and she thinks she's being helpful by pointing out the best way to accomplish anything.

An example of how we treat our children differently was vividly illustrated in another of her interactions with DD. DD makes pictures and letters for me almost every day. Sometimes she draws other things, but since I have been unwell, she makes me pretty pictures and writes messages on them, figuring out the spelling as best she can. She just started kindergarden in September, and I think she's doing extraordinarily well. One pic she drew for me had a big yellow sun in the corner and a little blue flower, and the words, "I mest my mom", meaning, "I missed my mom" when I was in the hospital. And she wrote me a letter:

Dear mom
I hop uoo git bidr soon fum uor srje

Translation:
Dear Mom,
I hope you get better soon from your surgery.

Hey, she's five (nearly 6, but still), and I just love how she is trying to express herself and is experimenting with sounds and letters. It's awesome. I really love all these pictures and letters and have a huge stack of them. I do my best to decipher the messages, and I appreciate how she draws everything, choosing the colors so purposefully. What I do not do is correct her spelling and grammar, since I don't want to squelch her creativity. I also don't bust her on bad penmanship (although I'm always busting DS1 for that), because she's just learning, and practicing on her own will get her very quickly to where she needs to be in that regard.

So it just sets my teeth on edge when my Mom looks at DD's work and does all those things I don't do. The day I was in the hospital, DD made a picture for me saying, "I love mi mom." She had been spelling "my" with an "i" for months, and it was really not at the top of my priority list to correct her: it's not important right now. Of course, Gramma takes one look at the picture and informs her that "my" is spelled M, Y... Dear Daughter gamely corrects it, and has been consistently spelling it correctly ever since. I immediately noticed that she had changed the spelling when she gave me the picture, and she told me that Gramma had told her to fix it.

Well. As far as I'm concerned, there was nothing to fix. When DD writes, "I love mi mom" I know exactly what she means. The kid is not a correspondant for a major news daily, you know?

Today, Gramma was busting DD on her letter formation, and I just had to clench my jaw and stay out of it. So far DD is not showing signs of being discouraged, but if she ever does, or if this "correcting" thing of my Mom's gets to be a more frequent occurrence, I will put a stop to it. DD's doing just fine going along the way she is. If she starts obsessing about spelling everything correctly, she won't write anything at all -- I've already seen her in that mode, and it's just sad.

I believe I do have the advantage of being more aware of what is developmentally appropriate for my kids to be doing at their present ages. Mom's still locked into "one-right-way," even though what she's asking for is unrealistic. And even I realize I have ridiculously high expectations for my kids on some things, and those unrealistic expectations can be joy killers.

Which brings me to the small but significant joy killer that presented itself today that got me thinking about this topic: my Mom does not like to eat outside, and I am going to have to make a major effort to move dinner out when the weather is gorgeous, as it was tonight. It was better that we ate in tonight, as it was late with the kids' RE class. But it was so beautiful, it would've been a perfect night to eat out.

I mention this to my Mom: "But it's pitch black out there!"
"Mom, we've got a light on the patio. It's not that dark out there."

Seriously, she has been here how many days? Five days, and hasn't even tried out the new chairs outside. Sunday I sat outside reading for over an hour as the kids played, and it was awesome. Maybe she thinks they won't be comfortable, but she should at least give them a try.

But I doubt that's even on my Mom's agenda. She's been kicking around looking for a knitting project, and I mentioned to her that I have been looking for a poncho pattern to make for DD. Today she announced her intention to make a poncho for DD.

Why can't I do this? Why can't I make something for my daughter? Well, she wants to do it, and it's a good project for her, so we spent some time online and found a free adorable pattern (indexed on Knitting About.com) which Gramma is now working up in the nice soft red acrylic yarn I had in the cupboard, waiting for the project.

I didn't say peep. Mom's better off having something to keep herself busy with, even if it's a project I'd rather be doing myself. That's not a help to me, but I can't let it be a thorn in my side, either.

The same way I can't let my Mom's stubborn refusal to even take the car for a spin around the neighborhood be a thorn, either. "Where would I drive?" she asks. To church, I tell her, all the while thinking: to get the kids when I shouldn't be driving? To the grocery store on the corner when we're out of milk? Up to the bookstore or library or Walgreen's when you just want to go putter sometime? I don't get this not-driving thing. She has been coming here for seven years now, I think it is a kind of phobia almost. Driving in East Falmouth, MA, is a lot more difficult than driving here. We're on a grid. The roads are wide and new. There's no fog, ice, or even rain -- forget snow. What we do have is a lot of traffic, and every intersection looks just like every other intersection, so I know that probably freaks her out. And she doesn't want to drive the van (I don't blame her), but DH could take the van to work if she wanted a car for the day, and the Civic is very easy to drive...

I may push the driving issue more later. It would be good for her to not feel so dependent on me. It would be good for me for her to not feel so dependent on me, too. Sometimes I feel more like the Mom than the daughter. Today was like that.

I know this is very whiny and critical, but it's important for me to get all this stuff out here. I love my Mom but I do not want to be a parent like her. By the time we were teenagers, she had very little interest in us, it seemed. That is probably completely untrue and much too harsh, but that's pretty much how all of us kids felt. "Graduated high school? What are you still doing here? Bye!" But it even went beyond that, to a lack of curiosity about what we liked and disliked (she didn't know dear sister's favorite chocolate, like mine, is dark and bittersweet, until I told her so), to a disinterest in what we thought about things, or even if we thought about things.

Heck, I still have no idea who she's voting for this year, and if I asked her, I doubt she'd tell me! I did once ask her, when I was a teenager, and she told me, "That's none of [my] business." Recently someone accused my parents of spoon-feeding me liberal dogma, and I just laughed about that -- no, my parents kept me in a cocoon, preventing me from developing critical thinking skills about anything, never mind politics..."sheltered" doesn't even begin to describe my upbringing.

There's a thread there, running from isolated through sheltered, they are different aspects of the same thing. My parents, who love me and my siblings very much and made many sacrifices for us, more than I can ever repay, still never engaged any of us, or really taught us to think. Was it that generational wall? Did they really believe that "children were to be seen and not heard," (which came up in today's Little House in the Big Woods reading with DD!) It would seem so, but that's not how my Mom herself was raised: her father insisted that all his children do well in school, even the girls, even though her own mother could never see the value in education for girls. I think my Mom was influenced by her own mother a lot more than she realized. Perhaps she struggled, too, not to become her mother, whose life was her home and her children.

Is it even possible to achieve a balance, between the interests of self, and the keeping of the home and family?

I am completely spoiled in this life (barring medical trials), but so far, it seems that the possibility exists. For now, things tip more towards the kids, and doing things for them, but I (usually) don't mind. They're very interesting little people, and I quite enjoy having them in my life. Nothing that I want to do for myself is quite as compelling as they are, at least not at this point.

I think that's right, and good.