5 Lessons My Mother Taught Me

As a mother, you are tasked with caring for, nurturing and challenging your child to be the best person they can be.  Usually, your best example of how to do that is your own mother.  My mother and I have a tumultuous history.  The older I get, the more forgiving I become of a past between us that has both enraged and hurt me.  I now recognize that she did her best with what she had, emotionally and otherwise.  I am grateful for the incredible lessons she's taught me and the example she has set.  I also work to do better in raising my son with the hope that he will do better in raising his own children.  I know I will make my own mistakes along the way and that's ok.  There is no "right way" to parent, only the right intent to love, nurture and do the best that you can.

Lesson #1 - "I don't believe in that" or the Importance of Conviction
Growing up, I thought my mom was so irrationally strict.  I would come home with a proposal to do this or that, having built bullet points and what I thought to be a compelling argument for my participation.  My mom wouldn't even dialogue with me.  She would just say, "you're not doing that, I don't believe in that!"   The most common plea was for something that required sleeping at someone else's house, an idea she was not even open to.  Looking back, I'm glad I wasn't allowed to go; especially as I got older and those sleepovers were just fronts for one kind of bad behavior or another.  While I was trying desperately to be American and like my friends, my mom held true to her convictions about what I could and could not do, and I am grateful for that.  And Myki's sleepovers will be limited, at least.

Lesson #2 - No Excuses, Play Like a Champion
Sacrifice and discomfort are inherent to elevating your station.  My mom sometimes had two plus hour commutes, each way.  She had to stay late for meetings and hire help for drop-off and pick-up and she had to figure out how she'd be able to go on business trips and weekend golf retreats because that's the level she was at.  That wasn't always pretty and she absolutely sacrificed time with her children to do all of these things. But if you ask her, she did it all for us.  No matter how difficult something is, I can do it, because of what she did before me and because Myki gives me strength.

Lesson #3 - Reading is Fundamental

My mom came to the US from the Dominican Republic without even a basic understanding of the language.  She learned English, enrolled in college and got a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Pratt Institute of Technology in Brooklyn.  She then enrolled in masters degree courses while a newlywed and got pregnant with me.  She was the only woman, only person of color, only immigrant and absolutely the only pregnant woman in her graduate engineering courses in 1984.  She wasn't able to finish her thesis but took all of the required coursework for a masters before having me.  She earned a Certificate in Project Management from Drexel University when I was ten or twelve and enlisted my brother and I to cut out images for her project presentation board one evening.  Academics, study, literacy is everything.  It is truly the great equalizer.

Lesson #4 - "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child"
Loneliness is probably one of the most challenging emotions to work through, because you have to figure it out by yourself and you have no one to speak to.  People are inherently pack animals; we want and need to be part of a community and a family.  After my parents divorced, I don't think my mom had enough of a village.  She needed more friends who shared her perspective, other women and single moms who had been through a divorce and professional women of color to network with.  My membership in in a Latina-based sorority, Sigma Lambda Upsilon/Senoritas Latinas Unidas, Inc., moderation of the MomsofSLU listserv, friends from college and prior work experiences and professional network fill that void for me.  When I feel overwhelmed by it all or question whether I should be involved in so many things and connected with so many people, I think of my mom and how she needed that.  My mental health is just as important to Myki, if not more so, as it is for me.

Lesson #5 - Parents are Not Your Friends...or your Dictator
A lot of my friends growing up felt like their parents were their friends.  This is apparently a trend of the Millennial generation.  My mom was far from my friend.  She was the woman in charge 100%. But now, now that I'm an adult and a mother, we are more friends or at least, a little bit friends.  I like to think there is a happy medium between pure friendship and pure autocracy.  I am still working to find that place and balance.  Discipline is just as important as listening and engaging in a real dialogue.  Everyone, even children, need to feel like they have some kind of input into their own fate.  Disney's Brave has reiterated the importance of that for me! ;-)