funny, isn't it?
by jeanne charters

I hear her howling as she comes in from school.
“Mommy, mommy….”

My heart clenches as I race to her. I see no blood, no bruises, no missing teeth.
“Nancy and Peggy wouldn’t talk to me today at recess. They’re my best friends and now they don’t like me any more.”

As I take her quaking seven-year-old body onto my lap for rocking and comforting, I feel my hands become tiger paws, the nails itching to scratch some sense into the eyes of the girls who have hurt my child.

It’s 10 years later.

“Mom, he’s taking Sue to the Prom, not me.” The voice is flat with sadness. My lap won’t hold her any more and she wouldn’t allow such intimacy anyway; but as we talk, me telling her he’s not good enough for her anyway, I feel the same itch of tiger paws as I did when she was seven.

It’s 20 years later.

The voice comes across 700 miles of telephone wire, controlled by strain. “Hi mom…got some bad news. He’s met someone else. The affair started at Saratoga last month. He’s moving in with her and her children. I’m okay,” (no she’s not) “just worried about how to tell the kids.” The tiger paws become large and more pointed than ever before, but I know they will not be used because they won’t help.

And there is nothing whatsoever that I can do about it. What I have now is all I have. And that is not what I want.

We like to envision motherhood as sweet as apple pie and soft as a feather down quilt. Sometimes, it is. Often, it is not. Not when your teenager loses his license over a DUI or you learn your little boy is going to need a kidney transplant during the next year. Those are just a couple of the problems that have confronted two of my four daughters recently. The trouble is, what hurts them, hurts me as well…like hell!
My daughters have lately made the following comment which I must admit to having thought myself a hundred times over.

“If I’d known all the problems that could lie ahead, I might have considered not becoming a mother.”

The spirit dies within me. I am convinced that I will never live again, no matter how long I go on breathing. What I do not know, ironically, is that this loss is more grace than I know, more grace than I can bear at the moment.

I think the problem with being a mother is that to you, your little girl or boy remains just that…little, no matter their degrees, their professions or their accomplishments. Can they survive the awful stuff that life sometimes hands them without me around to kiss it and make it better?

So, we all do wonder occasionally whether our life might have been happier, or simpler, or more successful had we not produced progeny. But then something wonderful happens!

This past weekend, the daughter who divorced the unfaithful husband three years ago came to visit wearing a sparkling new diamond ring on her third finger, left hand. She brought along a tall, good looking man who has the good sense to appreciate the wonder of the young woman he has won. They plan an October wedding. She doesn’t need him. She loves him.

I carefully observed the way he looked at her and saw the same love reflected back from her beautiful, blue eyes. It almost made me forget how hurt those same eyes looked when she had to pull herself together and explain to three little kids why daddy was leaving. My tiger claws retracted. Funny, isn’t it, how good that felt?

I shape me, great or small, wizened or insulated, out of the tiny little measures of newness that I allow to penetrate the depths of my darkness, one dollop at a time.
So yes, I am happy that I became a mother. Someday, my daughters will feel the same. Motherhood is not an easy gig, no matter how you cut it. But what would my life be like if I had decided not to have children?

I wouldn’t have the beautiful “roll model” scrapbook my daughters made for me on my last birthday…jam packed with pictures from their and their children’s childhoods. I wouldn’t have the hour-long conversations with each of them every weekend catching me up on lives lived from Maine to California with two stops in between. I wouldn’t have met the wonderful men the two eldest married years ago.

I wouldn’t have grandkids that visit in the summer and take me white-water rafting, horseback riding and down Sliding Rock even though I should know better, at my age. I wouldn’t have Reilly and Lily in California plotting with me on how we can sneak into another movie at the multiplex. Bad example, fun larceny, though.

I would never have seen a grandson named the top male bowler in Clifton Park, NY, at the age of 11. Nor would I have seen my 16-year-old granddaughter riding like an Olympian in horse shows or her two brothers winning hockey championships over in Eastern NC.

I wouldn’t have spent a recent weekend in New York City shopping ‘til I very nearly dropped with two 13-year-old girls from Maine who were mad because “our family is so poor we can’t afford Louis Vuitton purses”.

Yes, I would do it all over again…because

What I do not let into my world can never stretch my world; can never touch the parts of me that I never knew were there. What I once imagined must forever be, what I relived in memory for years, is no more. Openness saves me from the boundaries of the self and surrender to the moment is the essence of openness.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Italicized portions by Joan D. Chittister’s essay Scarred by Struggle…Transformed by Hope.

Jeanne Charters is a former V.P. of Marketing for Viacom Television. She started her own award-winning broadcast advertising agency in 1990. Jeanne lives in Fairview with her husband, Matt Restivo.
[ charmkt@juno.com; 828-628-0023 ]