Mother's Day

I am going to be out pretty much all week, so my posting will be limited to what I can find time for when I am home every night. I wouldn't expect much...just a warning:-)

Mother's Day, like some other things, tends to make me think. It makes me think about my own Mother and our relationship. Mostly, it makes me think of all the ways that I wish our relationship had been different. She was a pretty shitty mother, and I was no prize as a daughter...and the combination just wasn't real good.

As I think back, I don't really know when or where it went wrong. I guess that she was just too un-responsive during the first 12 or so years of my life...she was always there, but we never had much of a mother-daughter relationship. Then, she quit drinking, got married and had Munchkin, and tried to be more of an actual mothers. But then I never really gave her much of a chance to. Could be that I had just grown to like the autonomy. Could be that I never really trusted her. Could be that I just resented how absent she had been. Whatever the reason, I don't think I ever let her try to be a good mother.

And in her defense, she was much better at it the second time around. If I had let her be as good a mother to me during my teenage years as she was to Munchkin at the same time...well, we would have had a much better relationship. Not sure that was even possible, and then by the time I was about 16 we had just lost the ability to really communicate. And by 18, the shit really hit the fan.

If her husband (Munchkin's father) hadn't died 18 months later, I am not sure when or if we would have started speaking again. And who knows how things would have turned out from there? But we did reconcile, and then things were as good as they ever got. Being 1,500 miles apart and only seeing each other a couple of weeks a year definitely helped...and to be really honest, we communicated somewhat through Munchkin (who I talked to much more than I talked to my Mother).

I would never say that I had a "good" or "healthy" relationship with my Mother, but it was definitely better by the time she died. We had one massive blowout in about June of 2005 (timeline: she told me she was dying in May of 2005, Munchkin moved out here in August, she died that fall), but we had gotten to the point where we could communicate as adults and value the time we had together.

So Mother's Day always makes me reflect...on how things were, how much I wish they were better, and how fortunate I was that they were even as good as they were. It is always interesting for me to note how differently Munchkin and I remember our Mom. And, while we are at it, how differently Big Sis and Smoking Hot Roommate remember their Mom.

But...as they say...it is what it is. I still think about my Mom, but less all the time. And I think better things. Which is probably a good thing.

If nothing else, she got her second daughter really right:-)

[That second daughter, by the way, bought me a beautiful vase full of flowers and wrote me a Mother's Day card that made me cry:-)]