Motherhood – before you are even eligible to wear the title; you have ideas, aspirations, dreams, plans of how it will be, how you will be – this wonderful mother, in the land of Motherhood. Your children will adore you, your family will be happy, full of scrapbook memories and you’ll gather around at Sunday dinner where you’ll laugh and reminisce about all the wonderful moments you’ve shared.

Everyone wants this. Some get it. Some only get a taste and then they get something else. They experience divorce, they take their children through heartache and struggle, their family falls apart and they go their separate ways – no big family dinners, no group photos – just lots of individual snapshots. Many get something far removed from that first flawless daydream.

My mother started out (I think) with the ideal in mind – I know I started out this way. But both of us took a turn in the road and down the path of family fall-out we went. My mom went through so much. It’s only now that I have lived a similar reality do I realize this. As an adolescent, I just knew what I felt, what I was going through. I never considered what my mother was feeling. When she didn’t come through or live up to my expectations I felt she had failed, that she wasn’t doing it right. Later I would be the mom and my children would be the ones who only knew how they felt. They would be angry and hurt and feel I wasn’t doing enough, that I had let them down.

I remember trying to date after two divorces. I dated two men, (one after the other, not at the same time – always good to clarify) my son didn’t like either of them. In fact, he told me that it wouldn’t matter who I dated he would hate them all. Years later he’d share with a younger man who was angry at his single mom for dating, “Did you ever think your mom might be lonely? It’s not like you’re around hanging out with her.” It felt good to know that now older and more mature he understood and was able to be there for someone else.

I’m so much older now and in the past couple of years I’ve thought of my mom a lot. I’ve thought how scared she might have been, how her heart broke, how lost and yes, angry she may have been when my father left and we had to move and her whole world turned upside down. I also know now through mature eyes how much she tried, how much she searched for answers for one of my brothers who at first was thought to be retarded and would never get to be successfully diagnosed as autistic till he was an adult. This knowledge wasn’t there when my brother was a child. But she tried to make his life easier – it just never was.

I remember when I had severe back problems as a teenager and was told I’d end up in a wheelchair. She never gave up helping me to prove this wrong. I’m not in a wheelchair and I’m in my fifties. My mom went through teenage pregnancy with another brother, when people shipped wayward girls off to distant so-called aunts to deliver and put their babies up for adoption. This didn’t happen. My brother became a father at the age of seventeen, in front of a community full of judgement. My mom became pregnant at forty when it was considered wrong and irresponsible. But she went forward alone, when all her other children were crazy out of control, confused adolescents – she took on toilet training, preschool, fussy eating habits – all over again. We helped with the creating of Halloween costumes, putting the training wheels on the first bike and baby brother sitting. None the less, she was still the mom.

At eighty one, my mom has her own life – she has a circle of friends of all ages, she goes to Aqua Fit, takes computer class – she has an iPad. She goes on excursions with her seniors group, plays solitaire (on her computer) and I believe she is happy. She’s out there trying new things. Just the other day, she wrote to tell me she’d taken a Qi Gong class and then she went to volunteer at a local public school for lunch duty in the school cafeteria. Lunch duty turned out to be too noisy and too busy. This experience is already in the past. Qi Gong, she’ll return to. She’s an inspiration

Motherhood, while you take trips to the park, is no walk in the park. Hug your mom – let her know that sometimes you just didn’t know. But now you do. Now you know that sometimes when things didn’t seem to be perfect for you, they weren’t so perfect for her either. Sometimes when you were scared, hurt and angry – hanging on by a thread, she was too.

Photo: Nora Ann Cooke; my wonderful mom.