We all grow up

Since Mother's Day is near.

On Mother's Day of 1966, I had been a mother about a year and a half and my tummy was beginning to bulge with baby number two. Some of my friends and I headlined the women's section of the newspaper that Sunday with pictures and stories of how our lives had changed since we had become mothers. Diapers drying on the line, baby on the hip while I pretended to stir a pot on the stove. (How things have changed!) I knew I was a novice at motherhood, and felt a little unworthy, maybe guilty, of being a star in the photo op. But it is still that way. Young mothers still seem to get the biggest share of the limelight on Mother's Day. Now I am an "old mama," seasoned and battle scarred. But sadly those of us who have reached this wonderful place are often maligned by the media as cranky, controlling or grumpy. Our day in the sun past. How about a little more respect for our years of service!

I remember being in a store with my boys when they were little, and after the sales clerk gave the obligatory praises on their cuteness, made a comment that pierced my heart. She told me her sons were grown. "Grown and gone," she said. I wanted to cry. I couldn't imagine. I thought that she must not have loved them as much as I loved mine. Otherwise how could she bear to let them go! Funny how we remember some little thing that a stranger said, but I did. I suppose I needed to know it would happen some day.

I went through an emotional adjustment as my boys started leaving. I looked for books to help me through this stage in my life but could find none. I went it alone - it felt like - learning all the way. Maybe the biggest lesson was that while I would always be a mother, my role was changing. They were growing up and I must grow up, too. I had started as the object of love and affection, and became mom who met physical needs, provided safety, gave correction and reassurance, and eventually must have morphed into Sarge, as Trip called me a time or two during his teenaged years. (Was I really?) In the blink of an eye, our sons go the way of the man, and we mothers must let go, knowing we can't go back and change a thing, even those things we wish we could, and hoping that what we did do right will carry them through.