Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers, mothers to be, or mothers who are no longer present with us. Mother’s Day is all about appreciating your mother and the female role models in your life who have been mother figures to you. Due to this sometimes this holiday can be an emotional one, for many people, for various reasons. This day can also be a very celebratory one for others again for various reasons. Whatever the case, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this day will impact you in some way (whether you are a mother or not) because it will teach you something about womanhood.
For me Mother’s Day happens to be a little bit of both, emotional and celebratory. Here’s why.
It’s no secret that I don’t have the best relationship with my mother. Well it’s not secret if you know me in person and you know about my life experience with my mother (which if you don’t you’re going to learn a little bit about). While I do love her very much, and I am really protective of her, and very appreciative of everything that she does for me and the family, she hasn’t always been the best female role model for me. In fact, for a really long time she wasn’t a female role model for me at all. If anything, she was a role model for the type of woman I should not strive to be.
Growing up my mother was absent for most of my life. I have memories of her getting up every morning to go to work, coming home late in the afternoon and locking herself in her room for the rest of the day. On her days off from work she would leave and be gone all day, out with a friend or her significant other, and I would never see her again until it was time to start the work week all over again. So who was I left with as a parental figure for days like these? My dad and my grandma, but mainly my dad.
For about 3 years of my life this is what my relationship with my mother was like. I would never really see and whenever she was around I would never really spend any time with her. Needless to say, I didn’t really have any kind of a relationship with her because of this inconsistent routine and presence she had in my life. When I turned 16 she started to be more present within the family, but by that time it was “too late” for me.
I felt it was “too late” for us to have a relationship of any kind because my dad and grandma had stepped up to the plate and did the hard parts of raising a child on their own, especially teaching a girl how to be a woman in a world where we were considered to be the inferior sex. I had also learned to place my faith and find guidance about what it means to be a woman in other women, because my dad could only relate to what it means to be a woman in this world in regards to his personal experiences with the women in his life.
At the time I had a hard time understanding that my mother was discovering who she was during the time that I just so happened to need her most. For years I held onto the hate and disappointment that developed as a result of not having her around when I was growing up. I tried various ways to forgive her for “abandoning” me in my childhood, like acknowledging that she always made sure we had food to eat or making sure that every year we had presents to wake up to under the tree on Christmas, but it just wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough because as I become older and acknowledge her doing things for us such as these, they begin to look like excuses or ways to buy our love for her. Again, I was completely naïve and didn’t really understand what my mother was personally going through during my childhood to make her behave the way that she did.
My senior year of high school I spent the whole year in therapy trying yet again to process my negative feelings about my mother. I tried various forms of therapy such as art therapy, journaling, and one of one talking with someone who would just listen to what I had to say. I had some breakthroughs with a couple of them, but none really seemed to fit. After I graduated high school I thought entering into adulthood would finally allow to me better understand my mother and the choices she made in my childhood a lot better. To some extent I was right, but for the most part I was still holding onto negative feelings towards her.
I tried for years to put myself in my mother’s shoes and understand her thought process at the time. However, in doing so I ran into many roadblocks. For starters my mother has lived and still lives a very secretive life. I never understood if this had anything to do with her growing up without a father, her sexuality, her depression, growing up an only child, or all four of these factors. I never understood because she was never willing to open up to me about anything.
My mother has a hard time sharing her life story with me. She will disclose information that she thinks I am mature enough, strong enough, or have a right to know about, but never enough information for me to really know who my mother is. After about a year of trying to pry her life story from her very lips, I gave up. I’m not in the business of making people do things that they don’t want to do or feel comfortable doing, and I had decided that I wasn’t going to treat my mother any different.
Flash forward three years and my relationship with my mother is at a much better place than it was 7 years ago, but I’d be lying if I said I no longer harbor any negative feelings towards her. Don’t get me wrong I love my mother very much, but like everything else in this world, it’s not perfect, and it never will be. This Mother’s Day I really had the chance to reflect on how far my mother and I have come. 7 years ago, we wouldn’t dare share our wildest dreams with one another. Now we’re both in a more comfortable place where we can be supportive of one another in our separate endeavors whether we agree with them or not.
As I walked around target to I shop for a special Mother’s Day gift for her, and watched my mother watch a Disney movie she had never seen before (Frozen), and I sat with her for dinner at Jim N Nick’s, I thought about the life lessons I could take away from her presence in my life at that moment. She may not have taught me these lessons directly, and she may never know that she has taught me these lessons, but she did.
Life Lesson #1: It’s ok to care
I’ve lived a very guarded life. I’m a naturally introverted person and for some reason that always made me a target for other people. My hobbies consist of reading books, drawing, listening to music, and honestly just being by myself. Growing up this was against the norm for kids my age (believe it or not). If you had such “dorky” interests in things such as these then you were an automatic target. Kids immediately isolated you from everyone else, discovered ways to manipulate and take advantage of you, and always managed to find the most unique ways to belittle you without it coming across that way to others.
As you can probably imagine I grew up wanting to be away from the world. I loved going to school, but I never wanted to be around other people. I had very few friends growing up and the few friends that I did have weren’t like me. They were social butterflies, they enjoyed the company of other people which somehow ironically included people like me. Despite that I never felt comfortable enough to be around other people for more than 5 minutes. As a result of this I ended up making and losing a lot of friends for the entire course of my school years.
Shortly after graduation I started to believe that the problem wasn’t with me it was with everyone else. I had convinced myself that I wasn’t the problem it was everyone else. I accepted who I was but clearly no one else did. That’s why I couldn’t stand to be around people. Now I understand that while the constant bullying, and teasing, lack of confidence, and lack of effort on my part may have contributed to me not wanting to be around people, an even bigger part of it was that I cared about not being around people a lot more than I wanted to admit to myself.
I have always been the girl who could confidently stand on her own two feet. I support myself, get shit done when it needs to get done, share my own big dreams with no one but my journals, and keep all my emotions inside. Why? Because I have to be strong for everyone else. By no means necessary is there anything wrong with this, but it helped create a side of me that “didn’t care” about human interaction and what I could gain from it from others.
It wasn’t until my first relationship ended when I realized that I had genuine emotions about other people that I simply chose to keep in all the time. Even after acknowledging this I still didn’t understand how to manage and express those emotions appropriately. I often times continued to keep them bottled up inside me and when they were set free I was mean, rude, and destructive to others. It wasn’t fair to my close friends and it wasn’t fair to my family. I had lived a life not knowing how to properly and openly express my feelings for other people. I care a lot more than I’m willing to admit most of the time, but I never saw women in my life proudly display that type of affection for the world to see. So instead I pretend that I don’t care until I can’t pretend anymore.
I now know it’s okay to care about others. That’s a life lesson my mother has taught me.
Related Posts: 31 Ways You Can Take Care of Your Mental Health
Life Lesson #2: Always put yourself either 1st or 2nd
This is an odd one especially for me. My dad raised me to put other people before me. If there is a long bathroom line and you can hold your pee, let the person behind you go ahead of you. If you see a person needs help with carrying their groceries to the car, help them. If you have an important paper to write for school but your brother needs personal care around the clock, you put that paper on hold and make sure your brother is taken care of. That’s the way I was raised, to always put others before myself.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing but I was never taught to place boundaries when needed, and to deny putting someone else’s needs before my own when my needs have not been met. I’ve spent a big portion of my life (and still do) making sure that everyone around is me taken care of. As a result of that I experience a lot of stress, anger, depression, and sickness because I’m constantly neglecting my own health and wellness.
After learning that my mother lived a life pretty much pleasing others, I promised myself that I would not do the same. I’m still very young and have a long way to go, but that promise is slowly being fulfilled. I’m learning to put myself first when it comes to all the adults in my life, but second when it comes to the kids because their needs are still more important than my own. I’ve always heard the famous saying “you can’t help somebody else if you can’t even help yourself” but I never understood what it really meant. Now I do. So I always try to do something for myself once a week just to stay afloat of all the chaos in my life, and to continue to care for my family the way I do.
Life Lesson #3: We all want love
In addition to pretending that I don’t care about receiving human interaction from others, I’ve learned to pretend that I don’t need to receive love from anyone who doesn’t want to genuinely give it to me. I’m a very kind and loving person and I think it’s important for others to know that I care about and love them, but I never felt that it was important for others to give to me in return. I’ve never felt like I needed people to confirm that they loved and appreciated me because at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was that they were happy.
After seeing my mom struggle the past couple of years with living her life, taking care of the family, and coming to terms with the fact that she missed out on a lot of parental opportunities with my brothers and I, I understand that it’s ok to admit that you need reassurance that someone loves you. I still don’t seek it from others, but from time to time I do make it known that I’m feeling unappreciated for everything that I do for everyone.
Even when I’m constantly being told that I am appreciated (only after complaining about it) I still feel an emptiness inside. Truth be told I don’t know what that emptiness is or where it stems from, but I’m working on filling it up with love every day. My mother may have missed out on a lot when I was growing up, and she may not have been there to teach me about the kind of woman I should strive to be, but her struggle and my relationship with her has taught me that love is necessary in order to survive.
It doesn’t matter where it comes from or in what form you receive it, when love comes knocking at your door you always answer it.
Related Posts: 3 Disciplines Everyone Needs: Self-Love, Self-Worth, & Self-Control
Related Posts: Female Empowerment: 11 Empowering Books to Add to Your Book List!
Related Posts: The Ultimate Mother’s Day Gift Guide
So you see this Mother’s Day has been like most Mother’s Days for me. It’s hard because I have to find a way to let a woman who I harbor such negative feelings for, know that I love her and appreciate her for everything that she does for. It’s also something to celebrate because after all that she has been through she deserves to know that she is loved and appreciated by someone. The one thing I am sure about when it comes to my mother is that she makes the broken look strong and beautiful at the same time. She may not be perfect, and I may never learn let alone understand her life story, but she’s right where she is supposed to be. We both are and for every day and year that follows today I will constantly be reminded of that.
The truth is always right in front of us, sometimes we just have to be brave enough to face it.
Hope your Mother’s Day was amazing and beautiful. Moms, sometimes we can’t live with them but one thing is for sure…
We can’t live without them.
-Xo
Kimora