Good Mother, Bad Mother

I spent my early adulthood obsessively focused on my professional career as a business executive. But all that came to a screeching halt one late afternoon when my dad called to inform me my only sister had been hospitalized from a stroke. During the year my sister spent in a cognitive care facility, relearning skills lost from the stroke, I moved her two oldest children, ages six and eight, from Boston to California. I was thirty-four years old, and for the first time ever, I was playing the role of "mother".

My experience of parenthood over the next year was one of the most challenging yet insightful and invigorating times of my life! My days were constantly filled tending to the needs and demands of two children who had lost everything they had ever known, most important, their beloved mother. Within the first month of caring for them, I found myself doing the unimaginable; I slapped them across the face while in a state of frustration and rage when their whining and complaints took me over the edge. Lucky I had the wisdom to seek counseling, and was able to understand the emotional and painful impact parenting can have on us all, especially when unresolved childhood issues run our lives. I found myself being that parent, you know, the one screaming and yelling at her kids, in an attempt to control, threaten and blame them into submission.

I'm forty-eight now, and have remained childless through circumstances beyond my control. The year I spent raising my sister's children will most likely be the only time in my life I will call myself "mother". I've never considered myself to be a "bad mother", though I will never receive the Mother of the Year Award, that's for sure. I was recently reminded of the spoken words I often heard by my own mother, "I'm doing the best I can". In truth, I felt it was her way of not taking responsibility for her actions, or lack there of. Now I've come to find myself uttering those same words, not as a way to defend my position, rather as a way to offer forgiveness, to myself, and to others.

The image of the "good mother" as 'selfless, loves unconditionally and unselfishly', in my opinion, is an old paradigm. Culturally women have been seen as emotional, irrational, and were expected to be responsive to others, yet silent to themselves. The feminist movement brought a collective awareness not only to the inequality of gender and race, but to the suffering brought on by oppression. I believe the emotional cries of "bad mothers" are the uncontrolled forces and reactions to the domination and control by others, including by our own mothers.

What I've come to learn along the way is that if we nurture and care for the soul of our beloved young ones, teaching and guiding them in a way that allows for their individual expression, which may be different than our own, we might raise the emotional intelligence of our future generations. Because what the world needs is more people who are mentally sound, emotionally balanced, socially adjusted, physically well, and spiritually alive.

Laura Maher is the author of Auntie Mom: A Memoir of a Woman Returning Home, which is a universal tale of what happens when any of us are faced with the unexpected challenges life throws at us, and the transformation and growth that often occurs along the way. During the year Laura spent raising her sister's children, she found herself facing disturbing childhood memories. In time, she came to understand more clearly the reasons behind her turbulent relationship with her mother, as well as her fears and ambivalence with embracing the role of mother.

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