Happy Mother’s Day three weeks ago, everyone! After a long hiatus, I meant to write something for the holiday that won’t traumatise you. Late as always, here’s a light-hearted post about the person who pushed me bum-first into this world.
My Mom. Devoted. Introverted. Pragmatic. Perfectionist.
Once, a long time ago, I was unfaithful to a partner, and when in the ensuing mess my mom found out, she told me this: “I’m so sorry, this is my fault. I should have explained to you that one day you would want to do this. But you don’t.” This is quintessentially my Mom. You’ll want to do this, but you don’t. And that’s that.
My Mom and my Dad have been inseparable for over 40 years. The biggest fight I ever remember them having was over potatoes. We kept potatoes in the cellar throughout the winter, and my dad brought some up every weekend for our short term use. I imagine going to the cellar to get a sack of potatoes wasn’t his favourite chore, so one day he decided to bring up two week’s worth. But that much didn’t fit in the basket underneath the sink, and the extra got in my Mom’s way. She took this as a sign that my Dad didn’t love her anymore, and my Dad failed to reassure her, so a nervous breakdown was not averted. But after each crisis — too many potatoes, too few sandwiches — they emerge stronger than ever.
For the first seven years on my life my mom was on maternity leave (courtesy of socialism and two younger siblings), and during that entire time she did zero things for herself that I can recall. She dressed us in the morning, played with us all our waking hours, read us stories and cuddled us to sleep. I don’t think she and my dad went on a single date until I was a teenager. We did everything as a family: bedtimes and shopping and camping and museums and theatre and vacations.
I think my Mom genuinely loved parenting small children; she certainly claims that now, and I have no reason to doubt her. I see this is as a special kind of talent: I adore Pixie and enjoy (most of) our time together, but I often dream of uninterrupted sleep, uninterrupted cups of tea, and uninterrupted sentences someday. My Mom cherished us, in all our toddler splendour, and she cherished not having to interact with adults… which brings us to:
My Mom is an extreme introvert with a fear of being on her own.
As a teenager, I once asked her what she would do if she found out, hypothetically, that my Dad had had an affair. She said she might cut up his beloved tape collection lengthwise, but leaving him would mean she would be left alone, which would be worse than being cheated on. As a parent you never know when something you say or do, even in passing or without much thought, ends up shaping your child’s world view in a significant way. For my Mom and me, this conversation was one of those moments.
My Mom and my Dad each have a friend. They see my dad’s friend about once a year, and my mom sees hers about once in three years. All of them live in the same city.
Around my table on a weekend is a constant rotation of brunch, tea, and dinner guests. I get antsy, then depressed very quickly, without the anchor of a social life, and for me a social life means close friends. My Mom thinks I am an anomaly, and she is convinced that Pink suffers from the relentless parade of “strangers” I force him to see.
“Strangers” are what my mom calls people she is not related to by blood or marriage: the only acceptable forms of relation. She wants to be surrounded by family always, and she will fiercely support any family member in need. She welcomed our significant others — as long as the relationship seemed headed for marriage — with boundless patience and hospitality: she and my Dad housed, fed, loved, tutored and chauffeured a long queue of boyfriends and girlfriends. But my Mom’s desire for companionship ends at the leaves of the family tree.
My Mom thinks she and I are very different, that my social genes must have originated from my Grandma but lay dormant in her. But I think we are almost the same. We are social introverts: desperate for rich connections, miserable alone, shy and awkward around new people. There is nothing I dread more than a conference reception, unless I can attach myself to a friend. The only difference between my Mom and me is that I have had to re-create my social net, and the family I crave, seven times in new locations — sometimes in a new culture and once in a new language. It was a cruel and unusual punishment of sorts, but now I have all these sweet, quirky, caring friends around the world. One gets better at it. Baking sure does help.
My Mom is pragmatic, almost dogmatic, in a way that is difficult to understand in a non-religious person. For her, there is always a black and a white, a wrong and a right. Family is good, “strangers” are out to get you. Procreation is the point of existence, but daycare — where you leave your child with “strangers” — is evil. Marriage is always necessary, unmarried partners are never devoted to each other. Sex is great, but only virgins in their mid-twenties are marriageable. Chicken breast is the good food, fat is evil. If there is a single dust mite left in the house on Christmas night, Santa will not come. You are either perfect or a failure.
Some of her no-grey-zone thinking makes her the model of a conscientious, dependable high achiever. Whatever cause she believes in, she gives it everything she’s got, and then some more. She is an award-winning science teacher, her third career: the first two were not compatible enough with being an always-available mother. She always does the right thing, the productive thing, the practical thing, and she will push through any emotions that get in the way with sheer force of will.
But at times the same features make her appear harsh and even judgemental, without her realising it. She believes that she is speaking the truth at all times, and why would a statement of the truth hurt anyone? Here are some things my Mom has said to me over the years, without a trace of malice, in friendly conversation:
“You didn’t think someone would still seriously date or marry you?!” — after I separated from Husband at 30, and I expressed hope that I would find a happy relationship yet.
“Pink has time but you do not” — on whether Pink and I had time to have children. I was in my early thirties and we had been dating less than two years.
“Once you have a child, you stop existing. Nobody cares who you were before, and you should forget it too.” — on what should be taught at group therapy sessions to mothers at risk of post-partum-depression.
“If a child likes daycare, then there is a serious problem with their relationship to their mother.” — about the possibility that Pixie might enjoy child care at age two.
I know how to interpret my Mom’s statements, extreme as they may be, so I’m almost immune. Of those four quotes two made me laugh, but the other two stung, because they played into fears I had at the time anyway. I worried that Pink and I would have difficulty conceiving, but I wasn’t going to strong-arm him into a decision that we were not yet ready for. We waited another year, and now we are three. I worried that Pixie, like me, would suffer in his early school years, that he would be scared or excluded or bullied. Still, I hoped he would be happy, and so far he is: I have ninety-nine parenting regrets, but this is not one of them.
I meant to finish this post with a story or two about my Mom’s perfectionism, but I was delayed when I got caught in a severe bout of perfectionism causing a week-long depression so painful that I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write about perfectionism.
I was giving a talk to two hundred high school girls about my job and some math, at an event that was supposed to convince them to choose higher level math classes at the end of high school. The talk went very well. Later in the afternoon I was sitting on a question-and-answer panel, and some of the students asked a math question related to my lecture. In my answer I made a slip-of-the-tongue mistake and got a bit flustered, so some of my meaning got lost. This was one of many questions during the Q&A, after a lecture that everybody praised. Nonetheless, I could not get over messing up the end of my answer. It was The Worst Thing In The World for a week.
So, um, my Mom is a perfectionist. When she returned to work after seven years as full-time Mom, she found herself incapable of being the Perfect Mother and at the same time the Perfect Engineer. I was no help: I hated being at school after classes ended, with little supervision, at the mercy of my wild peers. If my mom was five minutes late, she found me on the school steps crying, but the chemical reactions she had to run at work had no respect for the school bells. She was set up to fail, and the one who fails is a failure. So my Mom went in search of a career that would be more compatible with parenting perfection, and she eventually came to teaching. Of course, she became perfect at it.
Unfortunately, my Mom’s children have grown up, and now she can only be perfect if we are all perfect: any imperfection on our part is a sign of her failed parenting. Deplorably, we are only human, with sometimes messy, real lives. A perfect child would have finished their Masters or PhD degree in the minimum required number of years, gotten married the week after graduation, had three children at regular intervals thereafter, gone on to be a world class <insert career>, and raised said children perfectly. And not in Australia. Our failures, now out of my Mom’s control, make it retroactively impossible for her to be perfect.
She has mellowed though, in her later years. She has told me that although she is a failure, she has realised that most people are, so she has as much right to consume oxygen as many others. She’s come a long way.
She’s one of a kind, my Mom.