I will remain anonymous. Who I am does not matter. What I am going through may help you, whether you know my name or not.
I am happily married and the mother of 4 adult children. When they were young I felt overwhelmed and burdened with never ending responsibilities. Many times I felt smothered in duties that I did not enjoy – cooking, cleaning, laundry, chauffering, hosting family gatherings, volunteering at school, meeting with teachers, and the constant shuffling and scrimping that were necessary for the family’s well being.
Perhaps I was the type of mother that should have just had one child. When our first child (a boy) was born, motherhood was absolutely wonderful. He was a delight and perfect. Not too active, very bright, and very loving. He was also too precious to me, and I was relieved and glad that we had 3 more children, all of them girls. [side note: Being an only child for 2 years, after his first sister was born and the attention was diverted from him to the baby, our son told us that he would rather have had a dog.]
In the old days of our parents, 4 children were the norm. In our day, our family of 6 was unusually big. I suppose we looked like a wonderful family, but I also suspect that people thought we were over populated, and I always looked like a wreck with too much on my hands.
Please don’t get me wrong – I had a wonderful life but I was not the mother-of-the-year type of mother, and I knew it. Our house was always messy, the kids’ clothes never ironed. My dreams and goals were less family oriented, but more personal achievement oriented. I wanted to create art, build a family fortune, and be able to do the things that I wanted to do, and not do things that I didn’t want to do.
I was not a bad mother, but I also wasn’t a great mother. I wasn’t the type of mother who told her kids and husband how much I loved them or gave out hugs at every meeting. I wasn’t the type of mother who dropped whatever I was doing to give my complete attention to what they were saying, especially if I was immersed in a project of my own – and I was always doing some project or other.
For the most part, and to their credit, 3 of our children became great adults. They graduated from respectable colleges, got into their fields of interest, and are successful and independent. We are quite proud of them and we have a good relationship with them of respect and love.
However, our oldest daughter is currently a mental wreck and living at home with us. She is the reason that I began this blog, on Mother’s Day 2013, to document our trials and the roller coaster ride that we are on, with the hope that the end result is a happy and normal life.
Will it be? Time, and the grace of God will tell.