Mothers Day

Mothers Day

This morning my sister Kathy and I received a text from my sister Barbara with a picture of my mother’s grave marker. The marker is a bronze image of our mother in her youth, her DOB and DOD spanning 100+ years, and the expression of love, “We will look for you always.” It still, four years since her death, brings a pang to my heart. I feel the need to examine that sentiment a bit as both testament to my wonderful mother and as an instructive guide to how we need to consider and lead our lives.

I am thinking about parenting today not just because it’s Mothers Day, but also because I packed my youngest son Thomas off to fly back home to Brooklyn yesterday after a wonderful week with him here on the hilltop. Being raised entirely by a working mother who returned to graduate school in her forties, raised three kids all on her own and never took a dime from dear old Dad (I think both pre and post divorce the ledger would clearly show her supporting him in both lives much more than any support he ever gave her), I have always felt that I owed her a lot. She was my role model and my hero on many levels. I would go so far as to say that whatever I am and whatever I made of myself was almost entirely attributable to her. As for my father, he did serve one useful purpose and that was as a bit of a cautionary tale of what not to be. It took me three tries as a husband to get that cautionary impact right, but I believe I was always well served as a parent in knowing very clearly what I would not allow to happen. A song I heard on the radio this morning implied that a father riding out of his children’s lives was not just possible, but something men had to work against happening. That just doesn’t make any sense to me and for that I am eternally grateful to dear old Dad.

I have actually had to explain that tendency of his to three half sisters and two half-brothers up until this point. Teaching is the best form of learning and that sort of learning gets internalized and ingrained. When Tom Cruise repeatedly says to himself in Top Gun that he “Will not leave my wing man”, he is talking about the sort of dedication and responsibility that parenting entails. Kids are yours til the day you die and beyond. In the same way that my mother influences me still every day, I expect all three of my children will feel the same way about me (or at least I hope so). It has occurred to me that nothing I do in my entire life will matter as much as the sort of parent I am to my children. Being good to your spouse pays lots of worldly dividends. Being nice to your friends comes back to you in feel good and reciprocation. But even if there is no worldly return from good parenting, I want to know when I die that I have done everything I can for my children and given them the best possible path I am capable of giving them. I have lived my life on a no regrets basis and there is especially nothing I ever want to regret about how I have handled my kids.

Good parenting is often a matter of differing opinions. Spare the rod and spoil the child has certainly faded as the preferred modus operandi, but tough love still exists in many people’s minds. The notion that you are not supposed to make friends with your children while you are raising them is anathema to me. Yes, I am weak and self-indulgent and want my kids to love and like me, but mostly I want them to respect the man I choose to be and to draw some sort of positive example from that. I think it is far easier to do that if your children think of you as a friend and not just an authority figure. My mother had her opinions even though she was adamant about me making my own life choices from the age of seventeen on. She never once tried to influence my choice of studies or career and simply trusted me to find the path that suited me. That was what she had done and, by God, that was what her children would do. Strangely enough, her opinions were more about the little things. She let me know I should settle down with a taller woman rather than a short 5’4” woman like herself. She also had opinions about the big stuff, but they were just her opinions, they were never foisted upon me. She wanted me to value work and achievement as she had done. And she cared dearly that I understand the importance of treating other people with honesty and integrity.

I wanted my children to have every opportunity I had and more (like most parents). That meant that since I did not give them the global vagabond life my mother gave me, I wanted to at least expose them to the world. I have done that for all of them to varying degrees and to the extent their wanderlust extended. I can see I have two children who prefer to be homebodies, but have learned from me the value of exploring further afield to at least some extent. I have a third who has as much wanderlust as any of us and would live abroad with minimal urging. One is persistent and hard-working to the extreme. Another is committed to hand-on parenting of a full-time nature. All three are creative and value that talent even though they each express them in very different ways. One is an arts & crafts maven, one is into music and media and the third is a creative business and lifestyle strategizer. I see in all of them the things that I care about and that my mother taught me to care about. I have no idea what influences my mother or father had from their parents. The topic simply never came up much and I suspect that the further one goes back in time, the less disposable time for such frivolities and teachings there were other than the basics. I imagine that this passage of values was like the three R’s of education and my parents’ generation had to make due with the basic menu while starting with my generation we have had the luxury to broaden the conversation.

When my mother died, I took the time to write her biography. That was both cathartic and an important ancestry milestone. My children and their children do not have to wonder or guess about what I felt that my mother passed on to me in a spiritual sense. It is all there in black and white for them to read. I know that my children have probably at most glanced at the book, the press of budding life being as time-consuming as it is, but I hope there will come a time when they become more introspective and wonder about all the things I have found myself wondering about. I believe that the natural passage of man gives everyone their moment for such pause and reflection (some more than others, I imagine).

Fathers Day comes on June 20th this year. I will be with two of my three children on that day in Brooklyn. The third has a relationship obligation and will be away hiking in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. I will see him a few weeks later. I don’t give a damn about the trappings of Fathers Day. I don’t want appreciation, I don’t want breakfast in bed, I don’t want twelve-year-old scotch. What I want is for my children to think about what they feel is important in life and how maybe I have helped them understand how best to get at that.