I used to feel a bit of heartache when my mother would buy me a carrot cake each year for my birthday.  Because I had liked it as a kid, she continued to believe it was my favorite.  She never asked me if my preference had changed over the many years and I never felt it was right to correct her.  But now that she’s gone, I often find myself craving carrot cake on every occasion she’s no longer here with me to celebrate.  I miss having that person who not only remembered what I liked as a child, but who so stubbornly sought to preserve her role in taking care of me in that special motherly way.

A mother’s love is complicated.  From my own experience as a daughter and from what hours of working with many young people has taught me, most sons and daughters long to be seen and accepted by their mothers for who they are.  And what seems like such a simple thing to offer your child, whom you adore and would give your life for, however, ends up being so difficult, ripe with misunderstanding and disappointment, potentially leading to years of quiet sorrow.  In living through my own trials and failures in parenting, I have come to appreciate the truly impossible task of clearing out your own opinions, desires, and perspectives in order to be the all loving, all knowing, and all accepting mother figure we like to think we could be.

As mothers, to begin with, we were born and grew up in a completely different generation than our children.  The world was so different politically and socially than what our children experience, it’s impossible to know what it is like for them.  And some mother’s even come from a very different culture or country, with language and nuances of meaning being a further barrier to understanding.  On top of this we have our own ideas and beliefs about what being a good mother is.  Often this agenda is born from a desire to correct what we felt was missing in our own childhood.  While this desire is noble in its intention, it may miss the mark of what is currently needed.  Since it’s based on a distant past, it becomes a blindspot to what is presently real and tips the balance of our perceptions to what we want to see and feel about ourselves as mothers rather than what our children want and experience of us.  And in our own efforts to protect our sons and daughters from mistakes, we may deny them opportunities for their own growth and decision making in the process.

And then there’s the most challenging thing of all as a mother – our role is constantly changing. As our kids grow, we’re continuously saying goodbye to how things were, letting go of how we understood everything about them, little by little, day by day, absorbing the grief and trying to stay open to a new way of relating.  But it’s hard to let go of being that most important person to our child!  Perhaps we mom’s hold on to our view of our daughters and sons when they were young because it reminds us of a time we had the power to know what they liked, fix what was hurting them, and be assured of our special place in their heart.  They needed us and we liked being needed.

And so now I cherish the carrot cake.  I understand it as my mother’s way of holding on to who she was to me when I was younger.  It’s hard to share our children with the world, even if we know it’s for the best. I truly miss having that person who knew my entire history and from this unique bond, thought she would always know what I wanted because at one point when I was younger I did, indeed, very much like carrot cake.  And that memory mattered to her even more than the cake.  And now that I have the perspective, thank goodness, it also now matters to me more, as well.