Sure, You Love Your Mom...

But do you like her?

Not to throw cold buckets of water on Mother's Day or anything...parenting is an important responsibility that ought to be lauded and respected--assuming, of course, that the parent in question actually parents responsibly, in a way that is good for the specific, individual child or children they are raising. But I suspect for many people this assumption isn't always the case. Or may only be partially the case.

Most people I know have some ambivalence around their feelings about their parents. I suppose I do, too. My parents are Good People. They live a Respectable Life. They loved me the best way they knew how. They gave me a relatively safe and definitely financially secure childhood. There are qualities about them I respect, and some I even admire. There are other things about them I don't like at all.

As a result, I love them (or at least, I've been raised to believe I do--ha!). But I've often wondered, if I were not their daughter, and I met either of them randomly out in the world, with no reference or connection--say, I was introduced to them by an acquaintance at a cocktail hour--would I have any interest in knowing them further than a quick, "Hi, nice to meet you?" I honestly don't know. I often suspect maybe not.

And my case is mild. My parents and I may not have a lot of things in common as adults, but they were not extremely terrible parents. I have friends whose parents were horrible people in most every way to them throughout their childhoods, aside from managing to keep them from starving. And yet these parents expect their children to provide them with the same filial love they believe every parent is due. They don't assess how well or poorly they did their job. They were parents, and so therefore, the child must be involved in their emotional--or sometimes physical or mental health--care for the rest of their lives. That is one weighty, and possibly undeserved, expectation. But you know what? Every single one of my friends can't help themselves. They keep trying to create that filial love they so desperately want to give (and have given back) from their parents.

Love of one's parents is a complex emotion, which can be a straight-forward, freely-given kind of love at times, but in all honesty (though I know most would hate to admit this) is also often at times tied up with a sense of obligation and latent childhood dependency instinct that we learned early on. As a child, to be outcast or abandoned by a parent is a threat to our very survival--that instinct gets burned into us, and I don't think it ever really goes away. And--perhaps because of this very message burned into all of us--as an adult, the horror of being rejected by family (or you rejecting them) puts a stigma on you, not just in your own mind, but out there in the world. I notice people who have decided they don't want to be in contact with their family or openly admit they don't like their family are often looked at with suspicion. There is a sense that the person must have done something wrong to put him or herself in that position--he or she must be the one with the problem. I think this is why you see so many victims of incest choosing to continue to go to the family Thanksgiving when the family member/s who perpetrated the abuse is/are sitting right there, surrounded by all the other family members who chose to ignore (and continue to choose to ignore) the abuse as it was going on so as not to rock the family boat.

Of course, that's an extreme example. It's not always about abuse. In some cases, maybe it's just as simple as some people just can not get along with their parents as human beings. Their minds, philosophies, politics, beliefs, ways of living, whatever are just too different. And yet, most of us feel obligated to our families just the same.

Does the fact that someone raised you mean they deserve your care, attention, and loyalty no matter what? Does your parent deserve to demand your life-long respect and devotion simply because they had the ability to successfully get an egg and sperm to smack together or sign those adoption papers, regardless of how they treated you as a human being after that moment? If you wouldn't have been friends with the person your parent is, or even liked her or him if you'd met outside of a family unit, does it mean it's okay to let that relationship go once you're a fully realized adult individual?

I guess all I'm saying is that in every society, motherhood is given the big, conceptual capital letters. MOTHERHOOD. And in Christian-founded societies, there's a lot of Madonna-ization that goes on surrounding mothers. In the US, that Madonna-ization reaches its fever pitch today, on Mother's Day. Just look at the image up top there--it's not a religious painting, but it's damn near religious in its connotation. And yet, it feels like so much conceptual stereotype and not enough reality. If you are a mother, your role is elevated. You are the Great Caretaker, the Great Sacrificer--even if you really aren't. You are to be adored, worshipped. You are to be given a Day, like a saint, or a president, or a person who changed the world.

To be a mother is to be given holy stature. I won't even get into here what that makes adult women who have not become mothers, either by choice or not, in the eyes of this society--that's fodder for another post. But I will say this: mothers are not holy. Yours wasn't; mine wasn't. They are human. They fuck up. Some of them not so much. Some of them royally. Some of them were bad mothers. Some were bad mothers accidentally. Some were bad mothers on purpose. It's okay to admit any of that, even as we may feel whatever level of love we do feel for our mothers, great or small, conflicted or not.

I can only imagine for the people out there today who have mothers who have violated the conceptualization of MOTHERHOOD with all too much human reality, that Mother's Day is a pretty awful holiday to have to deal with. And for any of the rest of you out there, who might not feel horrible about their moms, but might feel at least a little ambivalence about them, or around this holiday, I just want to say to you that there's at least one other person out there who feels like that, too.

We're not bad people for feeling like that. We're just human, just like our mothers (and fathers) were/are.

And I'm pretty damn sure that you and I are not alone in our ambivalence, even if no one else wants to come out and admit it.

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Note: this was a fairly serious post that derived out of a humorous origin, believe it or not. It all originated out of this very amusing, tongue-in-cheek top 12 list of "Gifts you should never give your mom for mother's day" over at AmericanInventorSpot. Note that as bizarre as these gifts are, they all actually seem to be for real--but can the #1 gift in the coundown really be legal?

Also, thanks to Davezilla for pointing the way.