Real Moms Let Go

I was tagged by Marie at Marie's Muses. She had written an entry about real moms, which seems to have begun at Kristen's blog, The Mom Trap. It's been a couple of days since I was first tagged, but this is the first chance I've had to sit down and make an entry.

"Real moms" is the topic. Go read Marie's entry (click on link above), with great family photos to show her kids growing up, her family together, and a delicious recipe to make your mouth water, as all her recipes do to me.

Marie's response to the blog tag is that real mom's make mistakes. True, and since she has pretty much covered that topic thoroughly, expressing my feelings on the matter, which only goes to prove that mothers feel very similarly about many things regarding their children, I'm going to try to expound upon another motherly matter: letting go.

                                                      

                                                   Kissing the Face of God by Morgan Weistling 

                        Real moms let go.

It's about trust and faith when we let go. We trust our instincts as mothers. We trust the values we have instilled in our children. We trust others to whom we send our children for learning, those who would make our sick children healthy again, and we trust our faith in God to hold them in His gracious Hands when we let go of our children's hands.

Mothers don't always let go without fear, but they do it because they know they have to. Apples fall from trees, and birds urge their chicks to jump out of the nest. Mother dogs nip at their pups when they want them to let go, and humans, ... well, we do it very gradually. It could take half a lifetime for some of us!

It's all about growing up. And we want our kids to grow up more than anything.

It begins the day they are born, and our babies are separated from us at birth. The umbilical cord is cut. After nine months, mother and baby no longer share one identity. Until that birth day, mom-and-baby seem like one. We only see the mom, and her swollen belly. We know there is a fetus developing in there, but until he is born, we don't really know much about him (or her) except that we want him/her to be healthy, and we know we're going to love whoever comes out into the light.

The baby is born, a miracle no less, and he is suddenly thrust violently into this great physical world beyond the warm and protective waters of the womb, perhaps a precursor of life experiences to come. The cord is often unceremoniously cut, but the mother has one last opportunity to hang onto the little one. As long as the baby nurses, no one but she can provide the nutrition he requires. Nursing is one way a mother can keep her infant just a few months longer. I can only describe it as bliss. The nursing couple experiences sweet, peaceful, shared bliss. Who would want that to end? But end it must.

My little one weaned himself gradually, and by the time he was a year old, nursing had ceased between us. That's when I realized that I was letting go of my son, or was he letting go of me? I was doing it on his terms. I knew then that I would follow his clock, and I would know when he was ready to leave me.

                                                      

Little by little, he did. I handled it all pretty well, from the time I let him go to day care (which began when he was six months old), to letting him go to kindergarten, and much later, on to college. It was much easier by then.

I remember his first night away from home, he was just five years old and he wanted to spend the night with a neighbor child. About midnight, we got a phone call from the neighbor, telling us our boy was homesick and wanted to come home. My husband drove down the road to pick up our son, while I waited at home. When the door opened, Steven came running to me, and as I stooped to hug him, he burst into tears. "I'm sorry," he cried. "I tried to stay there, I really tried, but I couldn't. I wanted to be in my house. I want to be with you and daddy."

I soothed his tears, and held him while he settled down. He fell asleep quickly in his bed. The next day, when the opportunity presented itself, I talked to him about what happened. He was embarassed that he had left his friend like that. He thought it meant he was still a baby. I told him it just meant he wasn't ready to spend the night away from home, but that when he was ready to try again, we would let him. The opportunity came within a few months, and he had no problem the second attempt.

Real moms know that letting a kid do things on their own is the main ingredient for growing independence. We also know that letting kids make a mess while doing these things on their own is also an important feature of learning. Kids make mistakes... it's guaranteed. But real momsknow that the mistakes are the main ingredient for the learning process. If you want a kid to learn how to cook, he's got to get in the kitchen and he's going to make a mess. He's going to forget to brown the ground beef before he adds it to the spaghetti sauce, but that mistake will only happen once. And then you both have something to laugh about when he's all grown up.

                                                   

He's going to be curious about life, and animals, and bugs, and plants.  When he is four years old, and he plays with a toad, his curiosity about the toad leads him to poke it with a stick. He pokes it so thoroughly that the toad doesn't move any more. He knows this is wrong, and he feels terrible about it, and he is afraid to tell his parents. They recognize his silence, and question him. He tells them the toad is dead. He leads them to the dead toad, a stick in its mouth. The mother removes the stick, and the toad suddenly stretches out its legs and hops away.

His curiosity and interest in learning about life means that things will come into your house, crawling, hopping, six-legged things because he wants to know more. It means the lizard he found on vacation, that you told him to leave at the beach, escapes from its makeshift home, and is found dead three weeks later on the fireplace.

We let our kids go so they can learn some things on their own, so they can practice making choices, even if they make a wrong choice now and then. They find out what guilt feels like, and how to resolve guilt.

The letting go continues as the child reaches out beyond the home and beyond school. He joins a baseball league, and real moms sit for hours under the hot sun watching their sons play baseball, even if their son has to sit on the bench once in awhile. The child grows older, and a real mom finds herself only needed as a chauffeur... the child is still too young to drive.

The greatest severance, though, takes place when the child starts driving. Real moms take up prayer rather than tell their children they can't drive themselves to school. I think the pain of separation was greatest those first weeks after my son got his license to drive, even greater than when he went away to college. By the time he started college, I had come totrust him, as he had earned all of my trust by then. By then, I didn't worry about him making mistakes because he was old enough to deal with any consequences, but I worried about those around him making mistakes. I prayed that the mistakes they made wouldn't be life-threatening to any of them.

Apparently, any mistakes they made were all part of growing up, and my son and his friends have all gone on to begin their own lives.

There are other partings that haven't yet taken place. My son has not moved to another state (I am happy to report), and he hasn't gotten married yet. Someday he will, I have no doubt about that, and I will welcome my new daughter-in-law with all my heart. I know when he marries that there will be another parting because he won't be mine any longer... he will be hers. When sons get married, they leave their mothers to cleave unto their wives.

When a daughter gets married, there is a part in the wedding ceremony when the father gives his daughter away. There isn't such a moment for the mother of the son. Why is that?

All this letting go is only in preparation for the final letting go, the one that happens when our child dies. The natural course of events suggest that the parents will die before the child. But sometimes, life gets real messy, and the unexpected happens.

 

                                          

My youngest sister was a mom, twice. A car accident killed herand her 12-year old daughter (shown here as an infant) 10 years ago come June.

                                                                 *********************

My neighbor across the street experienced the ultimate grief when her sixteen year old son was killed in a four-wheeler accident just three years ago. The mothers in our neighborhood gathered at the family's home in shock, all hurting, thinking "It could happen to us... at any time it could happen to us." And we were there for her, for all the good it did. Our words in her ears were weak, I'm sure. How could we even know whatshe felt like? We could only imagine. Her only son would never walk through that door again, would never sit at the dinner table, would never smile at her. Suddenly the family dynamics changed, ended in the blink of an eye.

All the practice of letting go our children doesn't quite prepare us for that kind of ending. I don't think anything can prepare us for that final parting, but real mothers all over the world do it when they watch their sons and daughters, in military uniforms, board planes to fly into harms way in foreign lands, or the moms who live in those foreign lands, who watch their families die in front of their eyes, many themselves dying moments later. Real moms often live with pain. Real dads do too.

Real moms get dirty, and messy, and real moms grieve, even for other moms who lose their children, or their husbands, or their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Real moms don't want to lose the ones they love, but real moms know it can happen at any time, and they will deal with it with the same kind of spirit and strength that pulled them through childbirth so long ago.

They will scream, and holler, curse, and cry, and then ...  they will find the joy in their lives once more. Real moms aren't afraid to do it again.

                                    

                               Somereal moms in my neighborhood, photo taken last summer.

I tag Caroline, Barry(who could write about real moms even though he's a dad), and Kate (if she hasn't already been tagged)! 

In fact, if any of you would like to add to what Real Moms do, write your own "real moms" entry and leave your links here. I just didn't know who to tag that would want to do it.

Also, post your journal link back at Kirsten's blog.

Thanks, y'all!

 

Beautiful image at top of entry is one of my favorites, a painting by Morgan Weistling called Kissing the Face of God. The link to Mr. Weistling's homepage is http://morganweistling.com/index.html.

Tags: Real moms, letting go of our children