Confessions of an Imperfect Mom
by Karen Edmisten in Faith on Thursday, January 28, 2010 6:00 AM
“I’m sorry I gave the doll away.”
“Two dolls,” my daughter corrected. “Both of the ones Aunt Kathy gave us.”
This conversation had me anathematizing every trip I’d ever made to Goodwill.
“No one had played with them in months,” I countered, “and I only did it because I really believed that you didn’t care and could live without them.”
“But they were special,” she said.
“I know,” I sighed. “Blame it on another decluttering fit. I have them regularly, y’know.”
“And they had those pretty braids, too ... ” she muttered, walking away.
Those braids were pulled out and the poor doll looked electrocuted within ten minutes of ownership, I thought bitterly, though the grace of a maternal censor kept me from saying it.
Who knew she would remember so much about two dolls out of the roughly ten quintillion playthings we have owned? Who knew that two drops in the doll ocean were not, after all, expendable?
Lasting Effects
It is moments like these which leave me imagining a future where my daughters will regularly attend therapy and frequent the confessional. They will bemoan the fact that their mother was an insensitive lout. They will confess their mighty struggles with the fourth commandment after long years of their mother’s callous treatment of all things juvenile.
I know how they feel. When I was a child, I was appalled at the things my mother overlooked—things that shook me to the core but escaped her notice. How could she not see that speech therapy was humiliating to a six year old? Why didn’t she know that Timothy Fields, the cutest boy in the third grade, asked me to sit by him at the Saturday matinee and that I froze and mumbled, “Uh, no, I’m sitting with my sister”?
Couldn’t she decode the devastation that accompanied moving to a new state in the middle of fifth grade, walking into P.E. class that first day at Birchcrest Elementary and having to play basketball in a dress and tights?
But now it’s my turn to be oblivious.
Things that have loomed large in my daughters’ hearts—bigger than I ever imagined—are sometimes complete unknowns to me. Carelessly donated dolls, the perceived favoring of one sister over another, a late night when further post-nightmare or heartache comfort was called for but I instead fell asleep ... These things can all become the stuff of betrayal.
Past transgressions (that I struggle to even recall) are carried, calculated, and come out in conversation when I least expect them, and I am walloped anew with the impact a mother has on her children’s lives. It frightens me to think about all that I do—or don’t do—and the effect my parenting will have on my daughters. I am a highly imperfect parent, a fact that pops up with alarming regularity on these impromptu performance reviews.
There Are No Perfect Parents
Then I remember my parents. They, too, were imperfect. Agnostic young adults of the 50s and 60s, they were at the mercy of an era that celebrated martinis before dinner and chain smoking in small spaces. Much of their parenting simply “happened” without all the forethought of today’s child rearing philosophies. They nevertheless raised three fairly decent and relatively happy, healthy people, in spite of the many betrayals involving gym class.
Knowing that, this whole parenting gig suddenly doesn’t seem so terrifying. Because, although I live at the mercy of a different era (one which, for example, can boast the irony of far too many “simple living” blogs tempting me to declutter too often, thus traumatizing my children), what remains the same is that a great deal of parenting is “stuff that just happens.”
And most of us survive.
Leaning on God
Add to those random odds the fact that I actively, relentlessly seek God’s grace and help in my mothering duties, day in and day out, and my chances of utterly ruining my children drop dramatically. Catholicism doesn’t guarantee perfect parenting, but it does offer me strength, hope, and Someone to turn to when I start imagining my children’s future.
And that’s why there’s one area I will never declutter: Our faith.
Daily, I strive to build it up, store it away, and pile more and more of it onto my kids, like the extravagant gift that it is. Unlike expendable toys (though I’ve learned that “toy worth” is a debatable issue), we can never be greedy about wanting more of God’s grace.
Yes, I make mistakes every day. Yes, my kids will carry some of my mistakes into the formation of their psyches. But ultimately, I trust that God will help them through that, just as He has helped me through the years ... with everything I have ever turned over to Him.
— Karen Edmisten is author of The Rosary: Keeping Company with Jesus and Mary. Read her blog at KarenEdmisten.Blogspot.com.
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