Deja Vu: The Mother’s Day Debate, AGAIN

This is the conversation Tim and I had this morning.

Me: I have a couple of good ideas for Mother’s Day gifts if you need any hints.

Tim: Do we give gifts on Mother’s Day?

Me: You’re joking, right?

Tim: No. Seriously, is it a gift-giving occasion?

Me: Really, you are joking, aren’t you?

In case you don’t know Tim personally, he jokes ALL THE TIME. There is no good reason for me, or anyone else, to take what he says at face value.

At any rate, he finally convinced me that he truly didn’t remember if he, or the kids, were supposed to have a gift waiting for me on Sunday morning.

I immediately forwarded him the link to “The Mother’s Day Debate” and thought I would share it with all of you, just in case someone in your life forgot as well.

“The Mother’s Day Debate”

My friend T and I were discussing Mother’s Day traditions last night – what we were doing on Sunday, what our kids, or husbands had planned, what we hoped for. We were definitely on the same page. We don’t need them to do something big; we don’t need them to do something fancy. We just need them to do something.

I definitely have friends who take the martyr approach, who are of the “It’s no big deal” variety – moms who are happy to overlook a lack of effort, sincerity, time, or money spent. I am not one of them, and as a result, there have been some rocky Mother’s Days around our home.

Before that second Sunday in May, I’d like to my kids know that:

There is such a thing as gratitude. There is such a thing as acknowledging the fact that each and every day, I serve you. I cook for you, clean for you, drive for you. I entertain you, love you, tuck you in at night, take care of you when you are sick, celebrate your accomplishments and mourn your defeats. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE doing this and I love you. I will continue to do this, whether or not I get anything special on Mother’s Day, Christmas, or my birthday. I will tell myself that deep down, you really do appreciate me and deep down, I really do believe it’s true.

However, I think Mother’s Day is a nice opportunity for my husband to reinforce the messages we try to teach our kids all year long: the art of acknowledgement, the joy of gift-giving, the impact of making an effort.

When they were all in elementary school, he had it easier. The teachers would help the kids make little balls of crepe paper flowers, signs of love, or traced handprints with poems written to melt a mama’s heart. Those were the good old days. I’ve only got the baby left in that demographic, and even her handprints aren’t that cute any more.

So now the onus is all on Tim. Somehow, he has to inspire the troops to really love on their mom. How will it turn out this year? It’s questionable – because they’re growing up and bought into the hype that it’s no big deal, that Mother’s Day is just another Hallmark holiday, that a hug and a kiss and a mumbled “Happy Mother’s Day” is good enough.

Sorry mister, it’s really not.

I’d like Tim to know that:

I know you are busy. I know the kids are lukewarm about shopping. I know you detest it. But I’d really like to get something from someplace other than Hallmark, Rite Aid and Starbucks, the three shops in a row at the strip mall a mile away from our home. I like to think my perfect Mother’s Day is pretty easy. A morning latte and blueberry scone, a trip to the beach, a plate of buffalo wings and a pitcher of dark beer for dinner, while we watch an NBA playoff game. You’ve said before that my Mother’s Day is a surfing man’s dream.

Tim might like to remind me at this point that I am not all that easy. That I forgot about wanting to go to church as a family, which always involves arguments about showers, clothing and shoe-choices. G**- Forbid, Molly has to wear something besides her slip-on, checkered Vans with a hole in the toe. Since it’s Mother’s Day, he has to do all the arguing. He might also mention that my morning latte is actually a “grande, two-pump, extra-hot, non-fat, vanilla latte,” which he can never order right since he only gets it for me once a year, and then despite his effort and embarrassment at ordering such a ridiculous thing, he has to see me be almost satisfied, instead of completely so. Finally, he doesn’t like dark beer, or buffalo wings, but I order them and he eats them, because after all, it is Mother’s Day. 

Now, if anyone is getting defensive on my poor family’s behalf, let me just say again that a gift doesn’t need to be big. It doesn’t need to be expensive. It doesn’t even have to be a bouquet of over-priced flowers. It just needs to speak my love language, which means it needs to come from the heart. And if their hearts are blank, if they come up empty when it comes to me, well then, that’s a story for another day. But I am going to pretend like that’s not the case. I am going to hope that they just need a little bit of encouragement to dig deep, take some time and put down on paper a little bit of mom-love. Is that too much to ask? Colored markers speak volumes.

Tim might also like to jump in here and point out that for his birthday last week I failed miserably at this very challenge. Only two out of three of our kids mustered up the energy to make him a birthday card and his gifts consisted of two gift cards from that same strip mall I was just complaining about.

In my defense, he always says we don’t need to get him anything. I never say that! But okay, I’m humbled, but that’s not the point. The point is the ideal we are shooting for here people!

So what do you think, moms? Is Mother’s Day a big deal, or not? Does your family step up, or is it just another Hallmark-holiday to you? And what do you do to honor your mom, and your mother-in-law, and your sisters and all the other mothers you know and love and your own role in your family all in the same day?

P.S. As I finished writing, I looked up and saw this. It was my one of my best Mother’s Day presents ever. I actually have it hanging next to my bed to help me remember who I am.

Who I Want to Be: A Fearless Mom in a Fanny Pack

Last Sunday, Keara saw a personalized license plate and said with a smirk on her face, “You know mom, Mother’s Day is coming up. What if we got you a plate that said COOLMOM. Would you use it?”

Now, lest you think my daughter actually believes I’m cool, she doesn’t. It’s our little inside joke.  We recently saw a play together where a “cool mom” showed up. In the first act, a tour group leader was taking attendance. When he called out, “Mom,” a dorky, fanny pack-wearing woman stepped out of line, threw her thumbs up like Arthur Fonzarelli, gave a couple serious hip-thrusts and said, “I’m not a mom; I’m a cool mom.” I almost died laughing, as my kids rolled their eyes and looked at me. Like the woman on stage, I’ve been known to rock a fanny pack on occasion. It’s cutting edge fashion.

But in all seriousness, I think I’m a middle-of-the-road cool mom. It’s not like my kids particularly want to hang out with me, or introduce me to all their friends, but they don’t avoid me either. I am good for all the typical mom things, plus I surf and keep a stash of candy in my car. Those are bonuses to be sure, but I also dance and sing in front of their friends too often.

This week however, I got a new label at a book club meeting. Many of the parents were sharing stories about how stressed out their teens were and how hard they have to work to keep their grades up. I share their pain, or I did until one dad complained that he didn’t know how his daughter got anything done between Twitter on her IPhone and The Kardashians on TV. On impulse, I shared our strategies and then, I wished I hadn’t. For Keara, there is no TV during the week; all tech gets checked in at 10pm, phones and computers included and if a grade falls below the agreed-on standard, there’s no Itouch, or laptop until it comes back up. Keara might not like the rules, but she gets them. She knows tech is the distraction. It keeps her from sleeping, studying, and socializing with real human beings. We don’t look at it as a punishment. We look at it as a way of helping her manage her responsibilities. When she is managing fine, she has all the freedom in the world. When she isn’t, we help her out. For my contribution to the conversation, I got labeled, “The Mean Mom” by the host, and I’m not sure she meant it in a good way.

How funny is that? I am the “Cool Mom” to my kids and the “Mean Mom” to my peers.

Just last night, at a school open house, a dad made a comment about his 16-year-old son who is really giving him a hard time and rolled his eyes towards K, assuming we were in the same boat. I told him we were doing pretty well actually.

He looked almost disappointed. “Do you want to trade with me?” he asked.

“Naw,” I shrugged. “We’re good.” And I woke up this morning thinking about why that is.

I think it’s about balance. My friend at book club might be a little too lenient. She didn’t have the stomach for a fight with her precious little girl, so she had let her run her own program. But other parents are too tough, too fixated on their own point view. On book club night, a dad and I were talking about our girls. When he heard that Keara was interested in music, art and fashion design, he said, “My daughter wants to go into fashion too.” I thought we were about to bond on the best schools and internships we’d found, but he followed it up with, “but she’s going to engineering school.”

Oh. Well, that’s another way to go with your child’s dreams.

We’ve all heard that perfect love drives out all fear, so I am guessing that most of us love our children very imperfectly. It seems to me that we parent out of fear most of the time. We fear they won’t love us if we disappoint, or discipline them, so we let them spin out of control and run roughshod over us. But forcing our own agenda and point of view on our maturing kids is simply another fear-based method. We fear for their future and what other people will think of us if our kids don’t meet a certain standard of success, so we ram our plans down their throats. I’ve parented out of fear most of my life, in both extremes.

When the kids were small, I was the softy, which was tough on my relationship with Tim, but when Keara hit the teenage years, I became hard as nails, which was destroying my relationship with her. Thankfully, I got some good advice last spring that saved us all.

While on retreat in Santa Barbara, the director asked us to bring to mind a painful relationship in our lives and I thought of Keara and all the ways she was driving me crazy. I could find fault with virtually everything she did and didn’t do and I felt totally justified in my hardness, because I was just trying to make her better. As her mom, it was my job to help her grow up “right.”

I don’t know what I expected the director to say next, but it wasn’t what I heard.  She asked us to close our eyes and consider a simple series of questions: “How does this person see me? Who do this person think I am? Who am I in this person’s eyes?” She asked us to drop our defenses and see those answers as truthfully as we could. In that moment, I broke down and cried, because I was horrified at what I saw. Through Keara’s eyes, I saw judgment and criticism. I saw pursed lips and raised eyebrows. I saw a mama on a warpath, who said “I love you” with her mouth, but almost never with her eyes. And I saw our future relationship and it hardly existed at all. When given a choice, do we ever willingly spend time with someone who treats our hopes and dreams, talents and beliefs with so little respect, or appreciation? I came home from that weekend and apologized for parenting her out of fear, instead of love.

As her mother today, I want most of the same things for her I wanted a year ago. I want her to be healthy and well. I want her to be good. I want her to have self-discipline and drive. I want her to succeed in whatever she is passionate about. But more than anything, I want her to be loved. I want her to know she is beloved of me, of her father, of God. If she doesn’t know that, then she doesn’t stand a chance in this world. That is the one thing I could never fully communicate to her when I was afraid.

Fear made me want to “perfect” her. Love reminds me that she is already perfect.

One of the hardest things about parenting is coming to understand that Loving our kids doesn’t always mean what we think it does. When they are small, Love means protecting them because they are vulnerable, but as they grow, Love means being vulnerable ourselves. It means dropping our defenses and agendas. It means admitting when we are wrong. It means trusting in their budding self-awareness and helping them to become the best they can be, (which might not line up with who we’d like them to be). At the risk of sounding like a cliche, love means letting go, but we can’t do it if we are afraid. We can only do it  if we are in Love.

People can think of me as a cool mom, or a mean mom, but the one thing I want to be is a fearless one.