Confessions to Mom

May 12, 2002

I have never left a towel on the floor in my life without hearing your voice. -- Cathy Guisewite

I have a confession to make. It's really a confession to my mother, but I'm going to stand up here in front of God and everyone and say this:

I don't clip coupons.

I know, I know. Like many of you, I can hear my mother's voice clearly in my head, gently but firmly admonishing: "But Nancy … …they save money!"

Mom, I'm sorry. I'm going to pay full price for my paper towels. I hate the clipping; I hate storing all those scraps of paper in my purse where I can never find them--until suddenly I do, and they scatter all over the checkout counter and I have to sort through them while everybody in line glares at me, only to find that the coupon I was searching for--the one for stuffed queen olives?--expired in January of 2001.

And furthermore, what was I thinking when I cut out that coupon for Hamburger Helper (buy two, get two free)? I was never really going to buy that! . . . .Or at least not while anyone was looking.

So, I'm 43 years old, and I'm taking a stand. I'm saying no to coupons.

You may be wondering why I bring this up--here, now. (You may be wondering quite a few things right now, and perhaps not all of them are unjustified.) However, my point--and believe it or not, I do have one--is that we all carry around these voices of our moms in our head. And, on balance, this is probably a good thing. I mean, how else would we remember to pick up those wet towels off the bathroom floor? Or to wear only underwear without holes because you never know when you might get hit by a car?

The tricky thing about these little voices in our heads is that we can't really choose what we want to hear and what we don't want to hear. Sometimes these voices tell us to do things that we would rather not do, or actually have decided categorically not to do. But it's hard to go against the little moms in our heads. As Erma Bombeck once said (and Harold likes to quote), "Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving." And this is why most of us have Things We Can't Tell Our Mothers.

For me, the coupon thing has, for years, remained a major guilt-center. But there's also the ironing thing. That's right, Mom: I don't iron. If it doesn't come out of the dryer wrinkle free, we try . . . another 10 minutes in the dryer. And in terms of my husband's shirts (which, to give him full credit, he ironed himself for ages), well, a few years ago we had a joint revelation: This is why God created dry cleaners.

In any case, I know it's not just me. I've checked with quite a few women friends, and they all have things that they would have trouble confessing to their mothers.

Asking my friend Beth opened a flood-gate of confessions: "Where to start?" she mused. "I don't change the sheets every week, I haven't bothered with a compost pile in five years, I've never washed the walls, I let the kids drink out of the carton, we sometimes eat cereal for dinner." And my absolute favorite from Beth: "I pay the kids to be nice to their cousins."
Some friends I spoke with asked that I not use their real names.

A couple friends--I'll just call them, oh, Rochelle and Bettina--did manage for a time to hide certain lapses like washing pantyhose in the washing machine or not always making the beds. But they express the firm belief that ultimately, all is revealed to Mum.

I like this idea that "ultimately all is revealed to Mum." It's almost Biblical: "For nothing that is hidden will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known." While as a child I probably feared this kind of ultimate maternal revelation, now, as a mother myself, I find the idea profoundly reassuring.

So, in the interest of complete disclosure, I'm going to propose that we all do a little sharing with our moms this Mother's Day. I think if we all dig deep, we can find a few interesting "confessions" to make to our mothers: things perhaps that we mean to say, but somehow never get around to expressing.; things that can be said regardless of whether the mother exists today as the guest-of-honor in our dining room, as that voice at the other end of the phone, or simply as that voice or memory we carry inside us.

To lead by example, I will offer up a few Mother's Day confessions, partly inspired by today's reading from Cathy Guisewite. Interestingly, I find that most of things I want to share are not about the sins of my past (you didn't think I was going there, did you? Even in a Unitarian-Universalist church we have limits!); rather, they are confessions to Mom about mothering: both hers and mine. In any case, I'm hopeful that some of you will relate.

Confession # 1 to Mom: I'm sorry for the 10-15 years I spent grunting at you.
I'm particularly sorry about this since I am now the mother of a teenager, and am, as they say, getting mine.

There's a book that's being circulated among parents in my age group--people whose children are just entering the teen years and who are hearing, for the first time, that not only are they the most restrictive, misguided, and paranoid parents around, but they don't dress very well, either. The book offers advice on how to communicate more effectively with your teenager and is called Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? This title pretty much sums up child-parent communication in my household these days.

In terms of my own experience as a teenager, I'm not sure whether I grunted at my mother for 15 years. It could have been longer.

I know this much is true: our relationship with our mothers is one of the most profound and intense of our lives, and is also (or perhaps consequently) fraught with tricky communication.
And that's even with the best of mothers. Not everyone had a mother who was easy to talk to….or to listen to.

To provide some biographical context, I should mention that my mom was one of the good ones: cheerful, easy-going, selfless, and loving. She cooed at strangers' babies in the supermarket and would scratch any muddy animal behind the ears. I have no doubt that the world would be a better place if everyone had been raised by my mother.

Still, I wouldn't say my mother and I were models of parent-child communication. Mom was pushing 40 when I was born, and although women today frequently put off having children until that age, in the 60s, when I was growing up, 40 years was a true generation gap. My mother was part of a generation of women who wore housedresses, rolled their hair in curlers every night, and got into a swimming pool really, really slowly. In contrast, being a 40-year-old mother today simply means your jeans are straight-legged instead of flaired, your Gap t-shirt is a slightly larger size than your kid's, and you play soccer with a slower and somewhat more accident-prone crowd.

In any case, my point is that my Mom and I were never mistaken for sisters. We never had the slightest chance of becoming the singing Judds. But while my mother and I didn't share a lot of heart-to-heart talks or giggle late into the night together, we shared a bond that was more profound--a closeness that transcended words. I'll come back to this idea later, but I'm convinced that this deeper-than-words bond with their children is what sustains a lot of mothers through the grunting years.

Confession #2 to Mom: This parenting thing is waaaay harder than it looked when you did it.
By this, I'm not saying that I think parenting today is harder than it was for our mothers. Granted, today's mothers tend to keep insane schedules--racing around in our Suburu wagons or mini-vans to camps, performances, tournaments, and lessons, but I find no significant difference between that and the '60s mother Erma Bombeck described, "racing around the kitchen in a pair of bedroom slippers, trying to quick-thaw a porkchop under each arm." The difference seems to me just a tendency for frustrations over red lights rather than over red meat.

No, for me, the most difficult thing about parenting is not the crazy schedule. Rather, it is the fact that most days, I have no clue whether or not I'm doing a good job.

When I take my daughter to Hodgies for ice cream instead of making dinner, am I teaching her that life is short and she should eat dessert first, or am I just modeling bad eating habits?

When I bring that forgotten homework paper to school, am I being the cavalry and showing my child I'll always come to her rescue, or am I teaching her that she doesn't have to be responsible for her own things? (And to the extent she often forgets things, can I really hold her responsible for a genetic trait so clearly traceable to me?)

I know there are some moments in parenting that I have not been proud of:

• The whole sleeping fiasco, whereby my oldest child didn't sleep through the night for her first three years was probably not handled as well as I would have liked.
• The time, in my sleep-deprived state, I taught the same three-year-old daughter how to open a childproof bottle of Tylenol was not my finest moment either. (I was distracted--talking to my mother, actually--and half-conscious that my child was struggling with something, I offered: "Just push down and turn, like this." Apparently, this is the type of thing a kid ever forgets. It wasn't something my mother ever let me forget, either.)
• Then there was the time that my child proudly announced she got a 97 on a test, and I said, "What did you get wrong?"
• Finally--although I could go on--there was the time when my older daughter's first grade teacher told me that my child was so polite, and I said, "Oh--you do know I'm Danielle's mother?"

But there are also moments of which I am proud.

• Making my child finish the softball game even though she pitched a terrible inning, was crying, and wanted to quit.
• The times on vacation that I fought back the waves of claustrophobia to scramble with my children into caves or a submarine or the tiny elevators taking us up to the Gateway Arch because, no matter what my feelings on the matter, they sure as heck weren't going in there without me.
• Holding a toddler in the YWCA pool every Saturday all winter long while we sang "Wheels on the Bus" and did the hokey pokey. (And activity that made the mother beside me sigh, "Is there no dignity in motherhood?")
• Finally, what I've always billed as my most creative moment as a mother: when I used a flashlight and a pair of tweezers to extract a sticker that my younger daughter had lost deep inside her nose.

Still, the maternal doubts are consuming.

As a parent, I'm especially haunted by things I've said or not said. Did I tell them to always use a firm handshake? When was the last time I reminded them about our fire escape plan, or talked about strangers in cars? Have I given them enough of Life's Little Instructions?

All of which angst, on further reflection, led me to my third and final confession.

Confession #3 to Mom: The best instructions you gave me were not the things you said, but the way you lived.

Despite the fact that I can still hear my mother's voice saying, "But Nancy--coupons save you money," what is more deeply ingrained in me are the life lessons she taught without saying a word--the things she modeled in her everyday actions:

Smile at babies in the supermarket

Be the first to say hello

Buy whatever kids are selling door to door

Always be kind

Never refuse cake on Mother's Day

Life is short; show your love

This last lesson has stuck with me. I remember with some clarity a day just after Mother's Day, ten years ago. My mother was visiting and we were celebrating her birthday a few days early. The place was a mess; we were in the process of renovating the downstairs of our old Victorian house--a fixer-upper my mother never really cottoned to, though she never came right out and said so--so we had cake on a card table in the middle of an empty room while she watched my 4-year-old turn cartwheels and my 7-month old learn to crawl.

Later, as my mother went to leave, I walked her to the car. I gave her a hug, and though neither of us were verbally demonstrative people, I recall clearly that the thought came into my head to tell her thatI loved her. Then a phone rang, somewhere a child called, my mother couldn't locate her sunglasses and toll money, and suddenly her car was moving down the street and the moment had passed without my speaking the words. Nevertheless, as she drove away, I remember thinking, "It's alright--she knows."

I believe she did know. And that's why I have never regretted not saying those words, even though my mother died, unexpectedly, two days later, on her 72nd birthday. It may seem like rationalizing, but words were simply never an important part of our relationship. It's hard for a writer to admit this, but words, after all, are just words, and although they have a power, it's not the power of what comes unspoken from our hearts, which can't be twisted, or faked, or ignored, or sometimes even stopped at any cost.

I talk to my mother all the time. I hear from her all the time. And neither one of us uses words. I hear her voice in everything I do with my children. I believe that through me, sometimes they hear her, too.

As Unitarian-Universalists, we are free to hear the voices that guide us from within as that of our mothers, or our conscience, or our better selves, or the voice of God. But if that voice says to you on this Mother's Day: hug a child, or stick more macaroni artwork on your refrigerator, or eat your cake first--then I say listen.

And if the voice says you can get cake mix two for a dollar at Stop & Shop with a coupon, then you are probably channeling my mother.

Thanks, Mom. Happy Mother's Day. Confession # 4: I love you.

The Driving Mother's Prayer

[Adapted by Nancy Crochiere, based on an adaptation by Judy Gruen in her book, Carpool Tunnel Syndrome.]

My Suburu is their shepherd;

They shall not walk.

They maketh me caravan to green soccer fields,

They leadeth me to late-night play rehearsals,
They tryeth my soul.
Yea, even though I drive somewhat over the speed limit,
I fear no law enforcement,
For my children yell "Speed trap!"
Their portable CD-players with headphones, they comfort me.
They prepareth a seat-full of cracker crumbs in the presence of their teammates;
They kicketh my cupholder with their Nikes;
My French vanilla decaf runneth over.
Surely safe driving discounts will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in my Suburu, forever.

Nancy Crochiere