Expectations

   As I grew into a teen who knew everything, I recognized I had expectations of my Mom. As similar as we are/were in personality and temperament, we were also completely opposite in other ways.

    Mom was a beautiful, thin, fashionable, gracious, intelligent, hardworking, popular, modern woman.  I wanted a stay-at-home Mom who sewed my clothes, came to every school activity with cupcakes, gave me brothers and sisters, would buy me a dog and drive a station wagon.  You know, the caricature of an American Mom of the 1950’s.  I think I watched too much Brady Bunch, Father Knows Best and Bewitched.  I created a picture that I thought was perfect and as I grew, I resented more and more I did not have this.  Because I was raised properly, this rightfully created tremendous guilt.

     A little background…..Mom had married someone who represented himself as a person he was not. Things went downhill quickly and for our safety she divorced him when I was 5.  She was left with tremendous debt he had mounted up in the small businesses in our town.  Although they told her to forget the debt because they knew and trusted her, she paid each of these businesses as little as $2.50 per paycheck to repay them because it was the right thing to do.   Never, ever, even once did she say an ugly thing about my Dad.  She did not place upon me her pain, disappointment and even fear that was part of her life during that time.

    Mom always provided everything I needed, miraculously on a single parent’s salary.  Christmases and birthdays were never sparse but abundant, she was home every night, our home was beautiful and spotless and I’m sure she went without to provide this for me.
   
    Although Mom and I always got along, as I got older and got married I continued to secretly resent what I believed I had missed and deserved; the perfect American Family dream.  Even as a child I knew she did not plan how things had happened with my Dad, I knew she was a decent, honest, hardworking person, that would have liked things to be different but I grieved over the perfect childhood. 

    It didn’t take long after becoming a Mother that my heart finally softened because I saw that the life I chose to lead as the stay-at-home Mom, sewing my and my children’s clothes, crafting, etc. would not have made my Mother happy.  It wasn’t who she was.   I began instead, to appreciate in a new adult way the many wonderful qualities she possessed. 

   I have an unproven theory that every other generation is similar to one another. It’s almost as if each decides they will be different than the previous.  My Grandmother was like me, my Mom totally opposite of her Mom.  As I pondered this as a young adult I saw that I could be the old fashioned kind of Mom I wanted to be, yet could integrate all the wonderful, modern, intelligent, deeply held convictions of the modern city girl my Mom had become after growing up and leaving her lovely Midwestern home.  I began to see God had a plan that I could never have thought of myself; that He was in control and that I was blessed to have the best of both worlds. 

                                                            
                                                        Me in my delusional mind !

                                                               Mom

   I consider myself an old fashioned Mom yet I practice a type of mothering that has all the benefits of modern thinking and respect for the personhood of a child.  I don’t mean to say we have children who are equal to us because we certainly do have a hierarchy here, but to say that they deserve respect as persons, as children of God and they are not our possessions but are on loan to us.  This is how I was raised. I am deeply thankful, deeply sorry, deeply appreciative now.  I see well that the “high road” that she so often spoke of need not belong to a certain type of person, a certain type of Mom or political party, or race, or religion.  She always took the high road and taught me the same. The qualities she imparted went beyond my unfair expectations of her.

   Now when I go home to visit, I step into her world and we shop and talk about fashion.  We ride in her fancy vehicle, have our nails done and eat out; everything so different than my world, but I now LOVE doing this with her. I love the person she is because she molded me into who I am and I rather like myself.  She is responsible for the way we parent and I am beyond grateful for this.

   This realization has made it clear to me that I must see all things in life whether I perceive them positive or negative as God setting me up. Setting me up for a revelation that no, I do not know everything, that what appears hard may be a great blessing in the future; that what is difficult is character building, that what seems unfair is, in time, a gift.

~Blessings~

           Lisa