Editorials
What my Mother Means to Me
By: luminoUS
luminous7@msn.com
So, I sit here turning this question over and over in my head, “What exactly DOES my mother mean to me?” If this question were posed this time last year, I would have a mirage of negative and belligerent comments to make as far as how I feel about my mother and our non-existent relationship, but through personal growth and the beauty of forgiveness, I feel totally different this year. People have always told me that I should love and appreciate my mother for who she is, faults and all, because you only get one mother. I never fully understood what they meant until I witnessed some of my close friends loose their mothers to illness and/or natural causes. I normally deal with death pretty well, considering, but I lost my great grandmother this past January and although I miss her dearly, I know my grandmother has it pretty hard. They were inseparable for 65 years and now my grandmother feels all alone. Sometimes, we have to step back and look at things from a different vantage point in order to truly appreciate what we have.
For the first time in 29 years, I was actually looking forward to spending mother’s day with my mother, but she will be in Kansas City witnessing the birth of my nephew. But, I’m grateful that my mother is still alive and well. In April of 2007, my mother told me that she was diagnosed with breast cancer. All of the resentment that I once held against her went out of the window and was immediately replaced with the fear that my mother would not overcome the cancer and die. I’ve lost both of my paternal grand parents to cancer and my father to a gunshot wound to the back when I was very young, so the thought of losing my mother scared me. Even if we didn’t have a picture perfect relationship, I realized that she was my mother and I wasn’t ready for her to leave.
It was then that I realized that I needed to let go of the past and make a mends. The only way to heal our relationship was for me to heal myself and realize that no person is perfect. No, my mother was not Claire Huxtable, but she was mine and I love all of the things that she has taught me. Whether it was learning from her mistakes or mimicking her habits, she gave me a strong foundation and she is the reason that I stand as strongly as I do today. Even though she strikes a nerve every now and again, I still love her. I had to realize that she is first a woman and then my mother. We tend to put our parents on a pedestal and view them as super-human beings that can create no wrong. It wasn’t until I knocked down that pedestal and looked her eye to eye as a woman that I understood that she did what she knew how to. I realized that a person could read all of the parent manuals that a library holds and they will still fall short in the eyes of their child.
My mother means the world to me and it took for me to put my differences aside to realize this. If it wasn’t for her continual lectures on hygiene, etiquette, manners, and education, I would probably be somewhere strung out on drugs, looking a hot mess and not able to write a decent sentence. She has taught me volumes without saying a word half of the time. You all know what I’m talking about, that stare that means, “You better sit down before I sit you down.” But as much as I joke about my mother’s discipline methods, I’m glad I got the occasional “whipping” because it has kept me on the straight and narrow and I haven’t veered off since. I’ve watched my mother overcome a number of obstacles and I can only imagine the emotional changes that she has gone through throughout my 29 years on this earth. To sum it up, she had to deal with being a single teenage mother at the hands of a murderer, battle a few of her personal demons during my childhood and then get hit with asthma and cancer in her mid-40’s but she is still standing strong. She not only beat the cancer but through watching her, she has taught me how to survive whatever life throws your way.
I love my mother dearly and I wouldn’t trade her for the world. If you are reading this and you and your mother are not seeing eye to eye, try setting your differences aside and talk to her as a woman. Look past “mommy” and see that woman who goes through life day to day. Look for that woman who cries and feels emotions the same way that you do and once you find her give her a hug and let the healing begin