Mom Material

My mom asked me a few months ago what I want to accomplish as a mother. What I am aiming for.

I answered fast. "To have them not resent me and to keep them alive."

She laughed. I did not. I have been turning that sentence over ever since.

Last Tuesday I yelled because she would not put her shoes on. We were supposed to walk before the heat came in, and she was sitting on the floor with one rain boot on, looking at me like she was trying to decide if I was still safe. I knelt. I said I was sorry. She put the other boot on. We went.

That is the whole thing, I think. Taking a breath, coming back to the moment.

There is so much thrown at you as a mother. Family, friends, strangers on the internet who have never met your kid. Most days it feels like quicksand. Either I am ruining her or I am barely doing enough. There is rarely a middle.

In the grand scheme of things, when I take a step back... I do not think I am ruining her. I also do not think I am doing enough. Both are true. I am learning to live in the way that I am imperfect and that that is a skill all by itself.

She does not need me to be calm every hour. She needs me to come back, calmly and with open ears and a quiet tongue. She needs me to apologize when I am short with her because I did not sleep. She needs to know that my love does not flinch when she is rage quitting or having a hard overwhelming moment.

Some of it I only figured out outside. Outside, I am not managing her. I am beside her. We are experiencing and learning together.

On a walk last week, she found a beetle the size of her thumbnail and would not move until I looked. I did not know what it was. I told her so. We crouched there in the gravel for five minutes while she watched it walk in circles. By the time it disappeared under a leaf, she was beaming like she had done something important.

She had. She practiced something we talk about in the hard moments… to be still, patient, and observe the moment. I got to witness my little girl regulating in real time.

That is where the sentence I keep turning over starts to change shape. It is not a goal, exactly. It is a direction. Keep showing up. Keep saying sorry. Keep kneeling in the gravel when she finds something worth five minutes.

She stops for acorns. A discarded bottle cap is treasure. She puts seed pods in my coat pocket and forgets them there for me to find on a hard day. None of that came from a curriculum. It came from being taken along with room to explore what she is naturally drawn to.

So here is the better answer I have been working toward.

I want her to trust me with her heart, her thoughts, her dreams. I want her to remember that her mom was strong willed, did not let her be a shithead, and loved her more than anything. I want her to keep noticing things. I want her to always be her.

One day at a time.