The other day I went to church with my dad. Afterwards, we went over my parent’s house. There was no sign of my mom and my dad and I started talking. The conversation turned to her friends and we were laughing and joking about some silly drama they were going through. It was all harmless chatter. I love and respect my mom more than anybody in the world. I’d never say a bad thing about her. My dad and I were just engaging in some family gossip, but when my mom appeared a few minutes later from her room looking pissed I knew our “harmless fun” wasn’t so harmless. My mom had heard everything and I suddenly felt like that eight-year-old girl who got caught licking the frosting off one of her homemade cakes; that made me wonder, are we forever stuck in our roles as Mommy’s Little Girls?
I was born with a title --- daughter, and it’s one I embraced with pride. Growing up my mother was somebody that I always deferred too; rather I wanted to or not. I respected her role in my life and never disrespected her or uttered the word “no” when she asked me to do something. But as I have gotten older I’ve found myself caught in that limbo between seeing my mom as the “kisser of boo boos” and relating to her woman to woman. When you get to be thirty-something just what are your obligations to your Mom?
Relating to my Mom as a thirty-something can sometimes feel like a surreal experience. When she treats me like a kid and offers me advice, I bristle. When she ignores me and just goes on her merry way and throws all her attention on my nieces, I feel a twinge of jealousy. When she “suggests” I do something that I’d rather poke my eyes out than do, I want to scream.
I watch people who are best friends with their Mom and I wonder how they made peace with the boundary issues. After all, any woman who says her ten-year-old daughter is her best friend and she tells her everything is ridiculed, so when exactly is that magic age when Mom and Daughter magically become equals and everything in their lives is fair game? I mean as much as I love my Mom there is only so much I know about her life and vice versa.
Think about it, for the first three years of your life you don’t even know your Mom’s first name. She is just Mommy --- giver of food and hugs and you are shocked when you realize that she is Amy, Teena, Elena --- another person with a whole other life that you know nothing about. And you like it that way. Who doesn’t immediately go deaf, blind and dumb at the thought of their parents being living, breathing sensual beings who make mistakes?
I think that’s the crux of a lot of our Mommy angst. We spend so many years cultivating this image that we want our Mom to buy into and so much time holding onto our image of who we think she is, good and bad, that we are reluctant to change the status quo that has been in tact since we were babies.
I think that’s why adolescence is such a battlefield for Moms and Daughters. It’s painful for us to have to break free of our assigned roles and we don’t do it with much grace or thought to anybody’s feeling but our own. Everybody hates their mom when they are a teenager. I didn’t, but I sure thought I knew more in my 13 years on this Earth than she did in her 40+. Every no was “stupid” at best and a conspiracy to ruin my life at worst. She just didn’t understand me and never would! I whined, never taking into account that she had done all this growing up thing years ago herself and probably knew a thing or two about it.
Sometimes it feels that when we get to a certain age our Mom almost becomes “the other woman in the family” and vice versa and there are times when we are so exasperated with each other that it feels like that movie “Highlander” in which there can be only one left standing.
Approaching my Mom as an adult is strange no matter how much we adore each other, but growing older means learning how to redraw our boundaries and redefine our relationships. I made peace a long time ago with the fact that Moms, all Moms, are a bit too nosy and too emotional. It’s there job. When we were born they took a vow to watch over us for as long as they could and it is a promise that my mom has kept in spades. That’s why I went up to my mother after “the incident” and talked to her about how it made her feel; it through her off too because mom’s aren’t really use to talking to their kids about their feelings.
I think it was a good step towards us seeing each other as people and not just our titles, Mom and Daughter, for a few hours we were just too girls chatting, and I knew then that not only would I always be Mommy’s Little Girl, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
till next week…
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