Mother's Day
Happy Mother's Day to all the moms on my friends list. It's wonderful to get insights into your experiences with your kids.
And especially to my Mom, who has always done her very best for me, and has become a real friend as I've become an adult. She loves me through all our differences, and supports me despite them. Her life has presented her with an incredible number of challenges, and she's still managed to raise me so well that I'm very regularly actively grateful to her for the gifts of perspective and experience that she gave me, growing up. I can trace so much of myself to what I learned from her. Her openness about mental illness gave me a framework for addressing my own with a wide network of support, because I wasn't afraid to acknowledge it. When I patient-instruct, and the students ask how I got involved, or why, I always end up talking about Mom, and how her straightforwardness about reproductive heath and sexuality (she was a nurse in Labor and Delivery for years) deeply influenced how suited I am to the work I do. The control I feel over my own sexuality and body is deeply based in her approach to sex ed. My feminism, and all the myriad ways that's influenced my life, is rooted in the way I was raised. She's been able to let me go, and pursue my own life, and encouraged me to do so, even though I know the geographic distance between us is ever harder for her than it is for me. I'm never sadder than when she wonders whether she's been a good mother, when the depressions hit her and she can believe that she wasn't. And that couldn't be further from the truth; how grateful and proud I am to have her as my mother is something that crosses my mind with remarkable regularity.
And especially to my Mom, who has always done her very best for me, and has become a real friend as I've become an adult. She loves me through all our differences, and supports me despite them. Her life has presented her with an incredible number of challenges, and she's still managed to raise me so well that I'm very regularly actively grateful to her for the gifts of perspective and experience that she gave me, growing up. I can trace so much of myself to what I learned from her. Her openness about mental illness gave me a framework for addressing my own with a wide network of support, because I wasn't afraid to acknowledge it. When I patient-instruct, and the students ask how I got involved, or why, I always end up talking about Mom, and how her straightforwardness about reproductive heath and sexuality (she was a nurse in Labor and Delivery for years) deeply influenced how suited I am to the work I do. The control I feel over my own sexuality and body is deeply based in her approach to sex ed. My feminism, and all the myriad ways that's influenced my life, is rooted in the way I was raised. She's been able to let me go, and pursue my own life, and encouraged me to do so, even though I know the geographic distance between us is ever harder for her than it is for me. I'm never sadder than when she wonders whether she's been a good mother, when the depressions hit her and she can believe that she wasn't. And that couldn't be further from the truth; how grateful and proud I am to have her as my mother is something that crosses my mind with remarkable regularity.