Mothers

27 weeks!

It's almost time, y'all. We're moving to San Diego, CA in just over a week! I feel like I should be running around mad doing things, but mostly I'm just laying on the couch surfing Craigslist for a place to live in San Diego. Some days I take the dog for a walk. Some days I don't.

Even though I feel like a lazy sloth, I've actually gotten a lot done. I've been advertising our current house for rent, and doing showings. Last week we found a really nice family moving to the area that will be our new tenants. I can't even describe the huge weight that lifted off of my shoulders.

My dear wife just returned after having been gone for a month. During her absence my mother came to visit for a week from California so that I wouldn't have to be alone for so long. It went really, really well (read: terribly). That was a job in itself. She came to make things easier for me, but I have to say (mostly because I know she'll never read this) that it was sort of like a job dealing with her. She's a lovely person and all that jazz, but we have your classically complicated mother-daughter relationship. It got me thinking a lot about the kind of mother I want to be. The legacies that get passed on within families, and the choices I'd like to make about which traditions to continue and which will end right here and now.

There's always been an epic power struggle with my mother. We both gripe with the same old tired complaints that have become scripted since I was 16. I think my mother is too overbearing and controlling, she thinks I'm ungrateful and disrespectful. I was reminded of this on her recent visit when she told me in our discussion (read: fight) that "We are not equals. I'm above you."  I remember reading an article/blog a month or so ago on the Adrian Peterson fracas and what it revealed about the racial divide in parenting. The themes from the article certainly seemed to be showing up in my relationship with my mother. Her unending need to assert this boss/subordinate dynamic between us. Unquestioned submission, even from an adult child.

This was the relationship she had with her mother, a woman who grew up in rural Mississippi, picked cotton, and never learned to read. Now, present day, she expected me to duplicate the same relationship. Even though, that one was fraught with so much pain and disconnection right up until her death 4 years ago at age 89. I could understand why Big Mama (my mother's mother) had those ideas. She grew up in a space and time where Black parents had to demand absolute obedience from their children, it was training for the world they would inevitably encounter. Born in 1921 in the deep south, there was no room for insolence or even the perception of it. There was no room for self-hood or confidence. It was a world where men were eternal boys. You obeyed, unequivocally. Your very existence depended on it.

But this is now. I grew up with a hippy mother from Northern California. I spent my weekends listening to the drumming circle at the Ashby flea market in Berkeley as the scent of incense wafted by and mother waxed poetic about her astrological chart.  My mother reared her girls to be independent, outspoken, educated. She very consciously brought us up to question authority and speak our minds. She expected critical thinking and opinions on the things that mattered. She encouraged us to fly the nest and explore the world knowing we always had a safety net with her. Yet, on this, she could not see that tradition isn't always what's best. Sometimes, it's just what's always been done. When tradition stop serving your relationships, perhaps it's best to reevaluate them.

Nearly 7 months pregnant with my own daughter I think about these things. How can I improve on what the last generation accomplished? How can I give my daughter a new gift? Children, of course, need guidance and structure. But, is it our job to lord over them? Beat them into submission? I don't know what it will mean to actually raise this baby. Maybe I've got a lot to learn from my mother. Maybe we both do.