Mother’s Day Reflections: Musings from a Middle-Aged Daughter about Her Mother

This Mother’s Day, I have been giving a lot of thought to the lessons my mother taught me both explicitly and by example. Though I will not see her in person this year, I thought it was important to share some the questions I have about her as I have my own journey to understanding her as a whole human being rather than a mere figure in my life.

I tell the people around me that our lives as children entail one truth: Our parents have existed as long as we have and therefore the day they cease to exist is a defining moment in our lives. However, our parents have had an entire existence before us to which we are generally not privy. They have an inner world they do not share with us because of the boundaries of parent-child relationship.

As a person with friends who have children of varying ages, I know that there are elements of my friends’ inner lives, behaviours, desires, hopes, dreams and disappointments that they share freely with me but would be completely inappropriate for their children to know. As children we have a very specific relationship with our parents that in healthy dynamics is supposed to flow in one direction in regard to self-disclosure. Our parents are not supposed to share certain types of information with us.

However, this is the part of mother’s life about which middle aged me has become interested. I am posing the questions I have knowing that it is entirely possible that the answers could be hard to hear and that maybe the compassionate response from her would be to decline answering them. She also has a right to privacy and my nosy questions potentially violate that. I completely respect that but, I doubt that I am the only person to ever wonder about this.

I often wonder if she had her life to live again, would she have still chosen to be a mother? If she could have chosen her offspring, would she still choose to parent me or would she have preferred an easier child? What was it like to parent a child who is so completely different in personality from her?

When she told me “stones are only thrown at fruit bearing trees”, is it because she was once on the receiving end of bullying behaviour herself? I wonder what it was like for her to watch me go through that and whether having to hear what happened to me touched some of her own wounds?

My mother always encouraged me to have my own income so that I would never have to stay in a relationship where I was not valued. I saw what she went through and I know why she said it but I often wonder what her life would have been like if she did not have me. What other choices would she have been able to make instead? What other paths closed to her because she became a mother?

Did she have hopes and dreams that I interrupted or was being a mother part of her hopes and dreams? As a middle-aged woman with friends who came to motherhood out of a deep desire to be a mother and others for whom motherhood simply happened, I often think about my mother’s experience. I chose a child free life and my mother never tried to tell me that it was a “selfish” choice or to emotionally coerce me into “giving her” grandchildren. She told me that my reproductive choices were my own and that she would support me no matter what.

As I think about my romantic history, I wonder about whether my mother harbours a “long lost love” that she would rather not tell me about. I wonder what she was like as she entered her teen years and started to develop interests in her peers. The worlds we lived in were very different and I think about how complicated it is to parent a child and prepare them for a world that is unfamiliar to you. I wonder whether she doubted her perspectives and practices and who she relied on to help her navigate the hardest job in the world with a strong-willed and mouthy child.

I remember my mother being strict about school because she knew that an educated woman has choices and is likely to be independent. She instilled in me a desire to learn everything I can and I watch her in her 70’s continue to learn about technology, social justice issues, current affairs, and whatever else happens to cross her awareness. This makes me wonder what her life would have looked like if she had access to the opportunities women do now and how she feels about that.

I have never doubted for one second of one day whether my mother loves me. I absolutely know that she does. However, I do wonder if I weren’t her child would she LIKE me. The difference is important since it is possible to love someone you do not like. As for me, those tumultuous teen years when we had epic screaming matches and I was a complete brat make me wonder to myself how she managed to hold all the stressors of being an adult while trying to balance that with parenting well.

Like all parents, she did not get it right all the time and I often wonder in the moments when she didn’t, what was she facing that made the action she took feel like the best option? When you are a child you see 2% of the entire picture. However, as an adult you realize that there are so many factors driving all decisions and that sometimes there is no clear cut “right answer” in the moment. Adult me understands this and knows that whatever choice she did make, she genuinely believed it was the best one at the time. Adult me forgives her, admires her and respects her. The child I was became this adult because of how hard she tried.