In a few weeks, my only son and youngest of my four children leaves for college. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds but still stings this mother’s heart. His three sisters have gone off—marriages, careers, medical practices, bands. Bobby successfully completed two years at Chesapeake College and works as a professional umpire; he’s remaining in-state at Towson for his final two years—I’m grateful he won’t be any further and am not sure why I’m acting like wooden crates are being shipped to New Zealand. His sisters will roll their eyes about it but also understand.
They still talk about “my broomstick,” a reference to “getting on my broomstick” to come to their aid for any reason, they know (age five or 50), I would and will. And they’ll all roll their eyes but they know “you get a mom from Philly, she will kill or die for you, no questions asked, go Birds.” I’m far from the best, fuck up all the time, but I’m not the worst: always willing to take accountability, over-apologize and try to do better.
Growing up in a household defined by poverty and alcoholism, my own mom struggled with mental health and motherhood and I remember wishing she had more things of her own that brought her joy separately from focusing on her children. As a teenage psych major I went to Alanon, as a 24-year-old I started therapy the day I found out I was pregnant: a certainty I had about motherhood was to do it differently than I’d experienced it. Although losing my mom was very sad, it didn’t change the difficult relationship—in fact, it added new waves of inevitable Catholic guilt. Over time as a mom, I’d have the recurring thought: motherhood is easy—you just say all the things you wish someone had said to you as a kid.
You find yourself drawn to depictions of bad moms, because they make you feel like “well, at least I wasn’t that bad.” I can quote chapter and verse of Mommy Dearest. My best friend growing up had a very difficult mom too because together we shared a lack of understanding for all the “normal moms.” I bawled my way through watching Jamie Lee Curtis as Donna Berzatto in the Fishes episode of The Bear—it has to be the finest performance of her career.
As a society we collectively understand the trifecta of America, apple pie and mom, and to disrespectfully speak of her is blasphemy. If you’re the eldest daughter in a big dysfunctional family and the only one who was treated differently, you don’t have anyone to talk to about it anyway. When you become a mom yourself, your life becomes an effort in self-firefighting to minimize the damage to your own kids when you feel ill-equipped to manage a role you learned from “what to expect” books.
I love my kids more than anything I could ever create or do on this planet. I kept my own work and hobbies, so I didn’t burden them by overfocusing and putting too much pressure on them—so I never joined a PTA, logged into a single parent portal or read a single one of their texts. I was a free-range versus a helicopter parent. In true Gen X mom style, if they were tall enough to reach a counter, they were tall enough to make their own sandwiches.
I read something recently about when moms should “retreat” or disappear so their kid doesn’t remain psychologically stuck at 14 and felt good about raising mine as independent humans. But then in the comments realized I struggle with how much to call them as adults—I could count on one hand how much my mom called me during my entire adult life, so I don’t really know what “normal” is.
Bobby leaving is just different. He crawled into bed as a little guy to hang out with me the longest, we watched all the baseball movies together, I kept score of a thousand of his baseball games. He used to need me and now he doesn’t. But the kids know I’m here. I keep the broomstick dusted off, just in case.