"What Choice Had I?"

In honor of the impending National Day of Heroine Worship (aka Mother's Day), I figured it was incumbent on me, as a Practicing Mother, to go on a little bit about My Kind. I know I'm a few days early, but with any luck I'll be so busy being celebrated on the Big Day, that I won't have time to wax poetic about my choice to be a mother.

I'm currently reading Anybody Out There?, the latest offering from Marian Keyes... my favorite chick-lit author. There is a great quote in the book that I think sums the state of Motherhood up very well. After a near-death experience, the protagonist, Anna Walsh, calls her mother long-distance from New York to Dublin to thank her for giving birth to her. Her mother replies, very matter-of-factly: "What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out?" Mrs. Walsh meant this as a way to deflect her daughter's gratitude, but I think that the statement actually points out the main reason that we have to be grateful to our mothers.

I have no choice. You are part of me. I love you. New mothers are often overwhelmed by this inability to exercise their own will, but they'll get over it. They may not want to get up in the middle of the night to offer the squalling bundle in the bassinet yet more milk, but they do it. Later on, they may not feel like reading Green Eggs and Ham for the 900th time since breakfast, but they do that too. And later still, they may not want to part with 20K smackeroos to pay for the wedding to that jackass with the long hair and the tongue ring, but they screw up their faces, take some great anxiety meds and they do that too. Maybe not without a fuss, but they do it all. Of course, this doesn't mean that we should take our mothers for granted (nor God forbid, be taken for granted) just because they (we) do those things without really wanting to. This isn't an excuse to trod on her (or your) motherly deeds, saying: "My mother does these things because she has to, not because she chooses to."

On the contrary... I believe that mothers deserve even more respect for having surrendered their primary concern for themselves to an all-encompassing need to protect and nurture their offspring (It is, after all, possible to NOT do this~ childbirth does not necessarily a mother make). Especially in the case where protecting and nurturing those offspring means that they have to make allowances for things that they would not ordinarily choose for themselves... the tongue-ring, for example.

Without a doubt, on the day I had my first child, I gained a renewed sense of respect for what my own mother must have gone through, parenting a child such as myself. But there is a level beyond respect that I hadn't yet reached. It's like you have to make a decision to give up, in some ways. You are still YOU (or at least most of us are). However, your status as a mother means that the YOU that's in you has to take the back seat a lot of the time to the MOM that's taking up all the space in the front row. You have to accept this as part of the job and move on. Every child should look at their mom and consider her life from this point of view. I don't expect this for myself yet, as I am relatively green at this whole parenting thing... but I hope that I will be that kind of mom, enough of the time, that my kids will realize all of this too, someday. That will be my reward for a job well done.