Hi - and welcome back to this lovely picnic spot. I'd like to share a nice chilled Italian wine called Cappuccina (not cappuccino, the coffee drink!). Very refreshing on a hot summer's day.
You guys inspire me to write. Your comments inspire me and give me ideas. You bring up topics that I might have thought of writing about but weren't brave enough to tackle yet. I thank you for your courage and your enthusiasm. My friend messaged me and told me her mother passed away recently, and then added: "you are a motherless mother too?" and I thought, "By golly, that expression cuts straight to the core".
When my first daughter was born and I consequently became a mother for the first time, my own mother had been gone to the other side for many years. I missed her before, but nothing prepared me for just how much I would miss her, and the shock and the pain of becoming a mother while not having my own mother around, the support, the knowledge of how I was as a baby, the love and the care that only a mother can give her own daughter. It was a shock to become a motherless mother.
It is a momentous event, becoming a mother, and sharing that and understanding what it means to be a mother for the first time in my life with my own mother would have been so sweet. Shortly after I became a mother I serendipitously read a New York Times article about the importance of the relationship of a woman's mother when she herself is giving birth. How women giving birth are more likely to feel "the baby blues" when their own mother is not around. And how it is not the same to have the father's mother - the mother-in-law - present after the birth. Ah, I wish I could find that article again... But instead I found this on how new mothers need to feel validated, need to feel like their new babies and themselves matter in this world, that someone CARES.
It really does take a village to raise a child....
I had my two children in New York City, and didn't have that village to help. I had maybe a few misguided village members: a pediatrician that had very little understanding... aaand... let me thiiink... nope, that was it. So in total that was one clueless village member.
My mother is gone, and there isn't a day that goes by without me thinking about her, remembering something about her, in one way or another. She died in 1989 so it's been a while. Sure, she was craaaazy (!!!) but she managed somehow to teach me, show me, love and compassion and understanding, the most important gifts you can give a child. (Many "normal", non-crazy mothers aren't successful in doing that!) Through it all she managed to raise me by herself in a foreign country with no family around - motherless mother as she was. My grandmother (my mother's mother) also gave birth to most of her children in a foreign country with no "village" around to help: being Korean and poor in Japan during the time of WW II.
I hope to break this cycle. I hope to be there for my two daughters when/if they have babies. I want to be there. I need to be there. I will be there and help them, guide them, or just sit quietly with them. I will answer their questions when they ask me, I will show them photos of them as babies, I will stoke their foreheads and tell them they did a great job, I will never stop telling them how incredible they are. I will show them they are not alone. They will not be motherless mothers!
Well, how nice of you to stop here on your way to where ever you were going. It was nice to see you again. If this was your first time over at my picnic spot, come back again soon. There is always space on my blanket if you forgot yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment