A Mother’s Day Apology
I owe my mother an apology, and a couple days before Mother’s Day seems like a good time to extend it. See, for years I’ve believed that my lack of good housekeeping skills were due to lack of correct training during my childhood. Somehow I entered the adult world without understanding how to clean up after myself. This was a source of great frustration to college roommates and then to Howard. It has only been in the last year that I’ve realized that my lack of housekeeping skills is not my mother’s fault. She DID teach me how to clean. I have many memories of her teaching me how to mop the floor or scrub the toilet or load the dishwasher. What she didn’t do was require such work out of us kids on a daily basis so that they became second nature. I finally understand why. She had seven kids. SEVEN. Every single day she had to choose which of the many important things would actually get done. She consistently chose creative endeavors over make-your-bed-every-day rigidity. I cannot fault that choice because I find myself making exactly the same choices every single day. I have four kids. Every day I have to decide whether to interrupt beautiful cooperative play in order to make the kids do work. I have to decide whether to spend energy on homework or housework. I have to choose whether to spend energy making meals or making kids work. More often than not, making kids do housework is the piece I let slide. For years I’ve felt guilty about this. I’ve felt like I was failing in the same way that I percieved that my mother failed. But that’s where I was wrong. My mother did not fail. She gave me every single piece I needed to be a productive and useful adult. It was my job to put them into application. It is not fair of me to whine because my mother didn’t make me be a clean person. I look at my siblings. All of us are intelligent, creative, useful people. The ones who are married have great marriages and are great parents. There is no way on earth that anyone can look at that parenting track record and consider it in any way a failure. If I can parent as well as my parents did, I will rejoice.