You only get one chance to get motherhood right

In the summer of 1989 I started to clench.  Clenching is when your jaw muscles become so stressed, so tight that you are barely able to open your mouth. The result is a little like experiencing lock-jaw when your back teeth almost adhere as you attempt to form your words and speak.  In 1989 I became a mother.  

Without even realizing I was doing it, I had employed this reaction every time I was on a subway and some strap hanger was breathing down my neck or when someone stole my taxi that I had been hailing in a hail storm for what seemed like an eternity or when a delivery man cut in to the fabric of a newly upholstered chair he had just delivered.  He cringed, I clenched. 

I would have clenched while giving birth but I was too busy screaming for dear life. On my good days I try not to hold my excruciatingly long labours against either one of my girls. My own mother described her own labour with me as “an axe breaking her back.”  She may be still holding this against me but I can’t be sure.  

I clenched when one of my daughters climbed in to a children’s store window and stripped down to her panties and we couldn’t get her out. For an hour! The crowds on Madison Avenue loved it. The owner of the store?  Not so much.   I clenched again when at four she did a cartwheel in the middle of a club dining room sans underwear.  After that the staff always remembered my name.

I clenched every time their school rang to tell me that one of them did anything.  Actually, I clenched and braced myself for those calls.  Headmistresses never call to tell you that your child just did something wonderful, at least the headmistresses I knew. I usually had two responses to those calls, “I’m so sorry and I’ll pay for whatever she broke” or “Yes, it will never happen again,” as in “Yes, Mrs. So and So, my daughter does understand that having pizza delivered to school for the entire class is not acceptable.”   

Naturally I clenched when boys started coming around the house.  In fact, when I think of it, their entire teenage years were spent with me in a constant state of clenching.  I clenched through driving lessons, I clench every time one of them takes the car and I think if walls could talk, the walls at Miles would clench, too.  

All is not entirely one-sided of course as my girls have had a few occasions to do their own amount of clenching. There’s nothing like your mother showing up in her bathrobe to a local bar to throw her kids out along with the rest of the underage patrons. The bouncer wasn’t too happy with me so I told him to …clench it. 

 I often joke that I am the family Sherpa bearing the weight of their well-being on my back. Please God that I have done the right things and pointed them in the right direction. I have been their bank, their guarantor for student housing, their ride to and from and their confidante when a best friend wouldn’t do. I have had to say “no” when my heart really wanted to say “yes.” But that wouldn’t have done them any favours. Motherhood isn’t a hobby and you only get one chance to get it right.  

In 1989 a maternity nurse came into my room and gave me a small china doll holding its own baby doll.  She proclaimed that the nurses upon seeing my foolish pride and love of my brand new baby girl decided that I deserved it. They laughed at me again when nearly a year to the day her sister was born. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.  I’m still thrilled.

A few months ago, my oldest daughter returned the china doll that she had kept throughout her childhood and university.  Having left the nest and settled in her own city apartment, she thought it was time I had my “baby” back.  I would have clenched  but this time I had a really good cry. Maybe I did right after all.  

Happy Mother’s Day!