but, she will move mountains.
In a moment of pre-teen mother-daughter angst, my strong-willed oldest stomps out of the room shouting “sorry you had to be my mother, that you are soooooo buuuurdened by it!” She is wicked smart and when she wants to sting, she knows exactly where to do it.
But, this is what I also know. She is confident with her sting because she is safe. She knows I wouldn’t trade motherhood for the world. She knows I love her and that I love being her mother and that I wouldn’t give up any of the joy or anguish of it.
Yet in that moment she got me and it hurt. She knows the work I do, fighting to break down barriers for working mothers, highlighting the challenges that mothers face, and advocating for organizational change. She knows all of it, and she used this as her leverage and power and it worked. She successfully attacked a piece of my identity. Psychologists call this a moment of “self-threat” when our identity is being challenged or dismissed.
But, here is what I want her to know. Yes, motherhood can suck. It’s not the always beautiful journey that you find perfectly crafted in greeting cards and nor is it the happily-ever-after of fairytales. Raising daughters is all at once beautiful and stressful and downright exhausting. Not knowing what to say, then finally coming up with what you think is the right thing, only to get shot down that you don’t know anything at all is humbling and anger-inducing every. single. time. Or, worse yet, firing words right back at her, sounding like a Trump debate all over again, bringing things down to a level you never think you’d sink. But you do. And do you learn? Sometimes.
And then I go off and fume. Slowly breathing in and out, swearing under my breath how I can’t believe I have raised this righteous child. I am fuming and fuming. Minutes pass slowly and I am getting all thick in the stew of it, making plans to assert giant consequences for such indignancy. And then into the room she bounds, laughing about something and asking me about a topic totally and completely unrelated to our feud. Somehow she has moved on in an internet minute and the episode has quickly become old news in her mind. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or launch right back into it again. But I am still stewing and think “oh no you don’t, I won’t fall for the ‘just ignore it’ tactic”. And so I try hard to keep fuming.
But then I realize that I still fume because, unlike her, I am not thinking about this moment in finite terms. But instead I view this moment, like all moments, as fluid. It represents not just the person she is today, but the teen she will become … who will then become the woman … who will become the boss … who will then be a leader for her family and her community. I think that in this moment, if I dare let this go, who then will she become? It’s so much bigger and goes so much deeper than a momentary tiff between mother and daughter.
I know my time on this earth is limited. I am hellbent in passing along my wisdom, not necessarily for her to follow exactly, but for her to use as a reference point to draw upon when she makes her own choices and decisions. I don’t want to make decisions for her, I don’t want her to be “just like me” (and lord knows she is already blazing her own trail) but, in the least, I want her to use my wisdom as a data point, mixed with all the other data points, to then move her own mountains. Maybe someday she will better understand my angst but, in the meantime, she is already doing things her way. And, so far so good, the mountains are already moving beneath her.
