I have Mother’s Day, and mothering in general, on my mind this week. I’ve been very aware lately of how many things pollute the nobler aspects of my maternal instinct:
- personal selfishness
- desire for control
- loss of the long view
- fear of what others may be thinking
- overprotectiveness
My ideal of motherhood involves some of these things, but in healthier proportions than they often show up in my own life. Of course I want to protect my children, for instance, but that’s not the impulse that should be directing all decisions, or I’ll create very fragile little people. I should be conscious of others’ impressions, because I’m training my children to live in a world of people. I want them to be able to function there with courtesy, confidence, compassion. (All the c’s, by the way, are a coincidence.) But I don’t want them to let fear of what others think shape who they become. So my ignoble impulses as a mother aren’t usually an issue of kind, but of degree.
There are two poems that capture the essence of mothering to me with economy and beauty. One is Wendell Berry’s “To My Mother:”
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong…
The rest of the poem is here, and develops, to me, an idealized picture of how any mother would love to be seen by her children. It details the kind of maternal selflessness that I want to practice, but feel like it’ll never happen. Then again, I’m surprised again and again by how little it takes to delight children. One brief wrestling match with Daddy. One half hour of undivided attention from Mommy doing whatever the child chooses. Those moments, not the ones I carefully plan and orchestrate, or that seem to cost me, are the ones they talk about with starry eyes.
Berry’s remembrance of his mother is a real contrast to this poem by Fleur Adcock, called “For a Five-Year-Old,” written from a mother’s perspective. It confronts honestly the awareness of personal imperfection and inconsistency, a sobering burden when we think of how our children look up to us:
I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another…
The rest of this one is here. I wonder if Wendell Berry’s mother had these moments. I suspect she did. I hope I’m not guilty of pulling the noble and good things of the world down to my level when I say that I think part of motherhood is the continual awareness of imperfection, sometimes failure, faced with resolve to stay in the game. That resolve is what I hope my children will remember about me.
Just as they hope I’ll remember that they’re people in formation, learning to live within their personalities and bodies and environments. They need the same freedom to fail I desperately need myself.
