When it's not all that instinctive...

This was where my photographic yearnings took me this morning; it seems an odd place to go for Mothers' Day.  But now, as I look at it, I remember that there were several years when the Mothers' Day present I most wanted was alone time, so my husband would take the girls off somewhere fun for a while so I could just breathe a bit.

He asked last night if I had any expectations for Mothers' Day, and I said no; I thought I was good -- he had, after all, brought home flowers and my favorite wine earlier in the day, and there's a package on the counter from one of the girls with "Happy Mothers' Day I Love You Mom" scrawled on it.  (I haven't opened it yet).

Mothering, of course, is not a task that ever seems to end, but there have certainly been times when I found it more challenging and demanding than I do now.  I suspect that's why I enjoyed my week in Portland as much as I did: it was a chance to experience the slightly more demanding times again, but without the intense emotional connections that complicate things so much when you're mothering teenagers.

In my reading in Kornfield's The Wise Heart this morning, he's talking about the ability to shift identities: the way animal trackers and detectives get inside the head of the one they're following, or an actor becomes the part she plays, or, he says, "A mother naturally and instinctively identifies with her baby and knows why she is crying."

That seems pretty idealized to me: yes, over time, you get so you recognize the different kinds of cries -- I was even able to do that with Kiwi, the little gosling we rescued and raised.  But was that a natural and instinctive identification?  And did I do that with my kids?  I'm not sure: I adored -- and still adore -- my daughters, but I was certainly not this perfect idealized mother, and my own mother was even less so.

My suspicion is that those of us who long for that instinctive knowingness are likely to be disappointed if we look for it in another human being; my sense is that only God is able to enter that fully into an understanding of us.  As mothers we surely long to know what it is our children need from us.  And if we're lucky we sometimes get it right and actually give it to them.  But I guess, for me, Mothers' Day is more about honoring the desire to serve, the willingness to continue giving, the determination to find and do what is best for our our children, and the ways we set aside our own instinctive self-servingness on behalf of others, than it is about our actual successful instinctive and intuitive understanding of our children's needs.

For any number of reasons -- some having to do with me, and some having to do with her and her own upbringing -- my mother found raising me to be a very difficult task.  And so today I set aside whatever resentments I still carry about that, and honor her memory with a little understanding: yes it was hard, yes she screwed up some, and yes, in her way, she loved me, and gave what she could -- and I did, after all, turn out okay.  So thanks, Mom.  You did good.