Achieving motherhood did not come for a long time after that. I was maybe nineteen or twenty when my Sammy arrived. She is now a mother with another on the way, and my own children are five and eight. When I recall my thoughts on what it meant to be a parent, I remember that my Mommy Fantasies focused almost solely on being pregnant, giving birth, and diapers. I didn’t think much beyond that. My brother had two more children, and each pregnancy and birth fascinated me as much as the first. I loved pregnant women and babies.
Even the day,, after years of believing that I would not be able to achieve babies naturally, that the two pink lines appeared on the little plastic stick I’d peed on just minutes before, my mind never made the leap beyond watching my stomach move and snuggling my newborn. How I managed to make it this far as a parent without losing them in a train station, accidentally shutting them in a closet or forgetting them in a grocery store is a miracle. Honestly.
It wasn’t until after my son was a year old, when we were beginning the arduous journey of diagnosis and treatment with my amazing Amazon Girl, that I started to consider the real job of motherhood. Sure, it’s the late night feedings, it’s the nurturing and the bonding, the kissing of cheeks, bellies and little feet. Its bandaids and cupcakes for the school party, girl scouts and dental checkups. Its playdates and baths, T-Ball and soccer games. But I now believe that what it ultimately comes to is LAUNCH.
I watch them grow and develop, I see the things they do and listen to the words and whispers from their perfect little mouths, wonder at their brilliance, and despair over my inadequacies as a parent. Because the launch part? That’s everything. How, please tell me, can I simultaneously suck up every moment of the joy in raising them and at the same time prepare myself and them for the day that I inevitably must let go of them? Now that I understand that they can’t live with me until they are forty, that they will eventually drive cars, go on dates, get jobs (ideally jobs that don’t involve robbing banks or running home-based chem. Labs) and go on to live their ungrateful little lives without ME, I fear that I will buckle under the pressure of my real job, the job of settling them comfortably into the rocket launcher of
I woke up one day and my rosy-cheeked stubborn little toddler was eight years old and looking frighteningly like a teenager. And I started doing math in my head and realized that she’s more than halfway to getting her learner’s permit. Even closer than that to her first bra. And I’ve done nothing, NOTHING to prepare myself or even her, for that matter, for this.
Our true job as parents is to have them so mature and capable of making decisions that when we turn them loose on an unsuspecting world, they don’t sally forth and blow it up. If you’re like me and you don’t have well-behaved, compliant children, this seems like a Sisyphean task. I can count in a few fingers the number of days in a week when I feel like I did a terrific job parenting my kids, where I nurtured their ability to make good choices, select whole-grain bread and NOT light the cat on fire. Some parents aspire for their children to win the Nobel Prize, to be doctors, lawyers, President even. Some parents have their children’s life-path mapped out practically as soon as the sperm and egg make contact. Me, I’m looking forward to the day when they can tie their own shoes. We already managed pooping in the potty, surely achieving a college degree can’t be harder than that?
In all seriousness, I don’t care if my children meet some arcane definition of “successful.” What I care about is that they leave me with an appreciation for humanity, for our environment, for our country. That they know how to give and receive love in healthy ways. That they respect themselves, their feelings, their bodies. That they find someone who loves them and respects them too. That they find something to do in life that they enjoy, even if it isn’t what everyone else thinks of as a “successful” career. I want all those things for them. And every day I need to remind myself that this is my real job as their mother. This is what God meant for me to do when He entrusted them into my care.
I’m going to make mistakes. I’m going to have days where I yell more than I don’t. Days when I feed them junk food. Days when they make me want to go hide in my closet with a bottle of vodka and a Xanax. But this launch thing? Is inevitable. So every day I will keep pushing that rock uphill. Hard as it seems, I’ll keep seeking the balance in my life so that I can be a whole person, both woman and mother, keep reaching for that sanity in between the fear and the panic of everyday struggle, so that someday I can push that launch button.
