Teach Them to Fly

Years ago, I started a tradition of going away for Mother’s Day. I travel about an hour away from my home to Sundance, Utah, a beautiful retreat nestled in the mountains behind the snow capped peaks of the majestic Mount Timpanogos. It’s quiet and peaceful here. I can hear the mountain stream roaring down the hillside outside of my window through the forest of aspens and pine. Some years, I do not think about mothering at all and I come here to get away; to forget all of my worries and troubles and responsibilities. I meditate. I do yoga. I stay up late watching chick flicks. This year, however, I have decided to immerse myself in mothering. I sat down and thought of each child individually and traveled through their life so far, starting at birth, using photos to remember things long forgotten. I laughed to myself as I thought about the silly things they did or said, and cried and sobbed as I held myself at the terrible heartaches we have been through together. This retreat rejuvenated me and filled me with a new desire to be a better mother.

Some days I think my parenting job is fairly ordinary. I pick up kids from school and pack lunches. I have an older daughter that is married and cares for herself now. Other days, I know that I am facing challenges not all parents face, and I feel somewhat alone in it all. I have a child with OCD. I have a child who is transgender. Depression runs through me and my children, and our brains are chemically wired to see things in a way that is painful.

For me, living with depression is like playing a game of chess against a master. Each move I make is countered with some new trickery I didn’t see coming. Parenting a child with depression is equally as difficult, if not more so. I have to be careful. I can’t push my teenagers too hard. I can’t lose my temper and say something I’d regret. I can’t tell my children that I’m in a dark place when they’re having a bad day, because it’s overwhelming for them. Yes, being a mother has taught me many things, and one of the greatest lessons has been restraint (and it’s a lesson I am still learning time and time again). To speak with love and truth. Changing pronouns was incredibly difficult for me, but now I tense when someone calls my youngest son “she.” I take a breath. “Not a she,” I sometimes say as politely as I can muster, or “the correct pronouns are they/them or he/him. Thank you.” So much learning has taken place in my mothering journey.

Within the last year, my husband and I found out that one of our children was abused by a friend when they were in elementary school. Everything about this destroys me: that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t sense that this was happening, that my child didn’t feel they could tell me, that I wasn’t there for them while they were suffering, that my child went through one of the hardest things I went through as a child, and seeing their pain now as they work through the trauma and it’s lasting effects. Being a mother is both beautiful and hideous. Wonderful and terrible.

Probably the best thing about being a mother, is the opportunity to teach someone your hard fought lessons. Dancing in the kitchen, teaching one of them how to make their favorite meal. The exhilaration and fright of teaching someone how to drive a car. Helping a teenager write a paper about a book you have not only read, but absolutely love. That moment when your child, who had been abused by someone else, asks you how you forgive someone, and you know the struggle it is to let that go and move beyond it and through it. We teach every moment we get to be a mother, in our words, our actions, our responses, our tenderness, our fierceness, and our vulnerability. Each moment, is a lesson. Many times, I have taught the kids what NOT to do through my trial and error as a human and they will sometimes say, “when I have kids, I’m never going to do that. I’m never going to ground my kids, yell at my kids, send them to their room, ignore them…..” whatever the current insult has been. This makes me smile, and also have hope for the future. They most certainly will be better parents than I am, even though I am giving this my very best. I have always known that their paths are not mine. It was surprising at first, how different from me each one of them are; they are each smarter than I am, they are tougher, they are vastly better at everything electronic, they are better at communicating, they are less angry than I was at that age, and they are each better listeners. Their paths are beautiful, and not my own.