I hope there would be some, “I loved it when she…”

But inevitably, there would also be a fair share of, “I wish she would have…” or “I hated it when she….”

I wish I could know now what those things were, so I could fix them now.

I would love to hear the same conversation in 30, and then 40, and then 50 years, to see how their perspectives might change with their experience.

And yes, I am avoiding my own feelings about my own mother. They are complicated and difficult for me. But I know she tried.

Fortunately, my children seem to be doing exactly the same for me, and I appreciate their willingness to see past the outer shell of my faults to the soft, creamy center that is my love for them.

And Katie, I agree with you that it is so difficult to figure out what things to accept and honor in our relationships with our parents. Some parents really do not do a good job with their children at all, and some children do a terrible job being children. Relationships are so tricky.

There is a huge difference between a mom who makes mistakes but is trying hard and a mom who doesn’t care to try. My mother in law makes lots of mistakes with her kids, but you know at her heart she is just trying very hard to be the best mom she can. As a result her kids love her and put up with her eccentricities.

My own mother, on the other hand, was far too wrapped up in her own problems to think about her children. Many times (just about every day) she made it clear in her choices and her comments that what was most important to her was herself. To this day my mother continues to take and take and give nothing in return.

Motherhood can be a powerful force for good, but it can equally used for bad. Many children struggle with guilt for not loving their parents more even when they are abused. It is hard to reconcile the idea that everyone should love their parents while at the same time carrying horrible scars that those loved parents inflicted.

Brooke, this is fantastically written. I think it took me a long time to understand that most mother/daughter relationships have at LEAST a little ambivalence about them.

My Mom is a good woman, and when I read some of the above stories I am saddened and grateful. She isn’t perfect, and I went through the whole angry/psycho-analyizing stage, too. From that, among other things, I came to realize she didn’t know how to create the close relationship we both yearned for. I knew she loved me, but didn’t know how to reach out on a deep level.

I don’t want to go into too many specifics today for some reason. I do want to say that I learned a lot when I decided to start asking her questions . . . a lot of why’s about things in our family, choices she made, etc. When I was thirty and still single, she came to visit and we took a trip down south to see the National Parks. I hadn’t intended the trip to be a question/answer session, but it ended up being that way, and I was so glad. It helped me incredibly to understand where she was coming from.

After that, I also started sharing things with her. Not advice-seeking kinds of things, or even all of my heart’s desires per se. But personal things that I was sure she wondered about and didn’t know how to ask.

It’s strange to realize that I have come to such a peaceful place in my relationship with my Mom. It’s not the relationship I yearned for when I was younger, but it’s good, and I am grateful. Very very grateful.

My mom and I do so much better now than we used to. Some of that is because of the 3,000 miles that separates me from her unflinching scrutiny. Some of that is because of the five children in 8 years I’ve now had (and she did too), so I understand things now that I didn’t understand then. But a lot of our improved relationship comes more from seeing and understanding more about her and her mother that I never understood as a teen. Mom has the misfortune of being the non-favorite child of a mother who has always played obvious favorites. That has wreaked havoc on my mother’s feelings of self worth. While that made her pretty difficult to live with in some respects, I am blessed because in all of my mother’s emotional mess, she chose to cling to the gospel and as a result raised me and my sisters to love the Lord; to develop a testimony of His gospel independently strong of anything she or my dad said or did. Even though for most of her life she didn’t believe she was worthy of heavenly love, she somehow raised me to have utter and complete confidence in my Savior’s love. Those gifts are the most amazing and wonderful things that I could ever have been given. The further I get into this parenting thing, the more important it is for me to be able to replicate that amazing gift of testimony and security in the love of the Lord, because that is the only real safety I can offer for my children in this scary world.

I love this. Maybe that is sometimes all we can ask for– definitely along the lines of a “superior cow!”

My own mother is pretty amazing. I have a good relationship, but I know that the relationship she has with my older sisters is complex. When my dad’s first wife died, leaving him with three young daughters, ages 6,4, and 6 months, and struggling, I’m not sure what he hoped for in his or their future. A year later, he met my mother and courted her. She was young, barely 19 when they met. Often, I wonder how she had the courage to take a leap of faith, marry a convert widow with three girls who had lost their mother and then were raised by a doting grandmother. And so my mom leapt into motherhood, hardly grown herself. To top it off, my dad, who owned his own construction company, was gone for weeks at a time, building roads around the state. Not only was she a newlywed, but a new mother, and most of the time, a single mother. She worked hard, made lots of mistakes, and I’m sure felt more overwhelmed than most people can imagine. Then as the girls grew up, my younger sisters and I were born. Can you imagine giving so much to your family, and then having your teenage daughters throw your mistakes in your face or defy your authority, because you weren’t their real mother? One of my sisters, in particular, hates my mother, blames her for all her problems and is very cruel to her. It makes me angry because I know how much my mother tried and still tries.

As I bungle along in my own motherhood, trying to cope with a pregnancy, a chronic illness and stress, I know I yell far too often at my children, I ignore them and generally make mistakes that will probably scar them for life. The only hope that I have is that they won’t hate me forever and see the effort I did make, even when it didn’t appear to be much.

P.S. She already has her Star Trek uniform ironed and ready for the big movie opening on Friday. Seriously. Nothing like a chubby 60-something-year-old woman who will stand up in the middle of the movie and shout “make it so!”.

I would never do that.