This year, I experienced the media as more focused on Mother’s Day than in past years. My antenna go up. Whenever women are honored as mothers, there is a tendency to down play us as employees and to draw a much too clear distinction between motherhood and fatherhood. Back to traditional gender roles. That having been said, I had a great Mother’s Day.
Our oldest son was here on business and he cooked breakfast for us on Sunday morning…an he cleaned up too! Later in the day, he was joined by his wife, daughter, and her boy friend and we were all joined by our youngest son and his family. We had chinese food and a great time together.
I got an impatience plant that looked a little weathered, but by this morning it was looking fresh and beautiful. Our other son had to stay home to do some parenting with his oldest son who has a bad ankle sprain and needed to take his SATS. He spent time with his ex-mother-in-law. I’m sure she appreciated that.
Today I am back to mother worrying responsibility. Now that our children are hugrown and on their own with grown and growing children of thier own, I have no day-to-day parent tasks. So I see that caring about them and loving them as much as I do needs, at times, to be expressed by desiring their happiness with my whole heart, and the fulfillment of their potential. This, of course, entails warding off the dragons with the power of my mind. Thus, worry.
As a human being, I have been engaged in motherhood and employment all of my adult life. Warding off dragons was never part of my professional job. In all of the positions I held, I contended with dragons. Warding them off was not part of the package. So, my grown children now contend with challenges as I have and still do, though to a much lessor degree. And I am the dragon slayer. I am sure that they, in their own parenting, carry the burden of worry on their shoulders too.
In my own parenting life, I have not made much of the difference between women and men’s relationships with their children. I have noticed though, that I seem to worry more than my husband does.