I am all about my kids. I have been a mother since before I was an adult. I got pregnant with my daughter when I was 16 right before my senior year of high school started (I skipped a grade in elementary), and I was 17 when she was born a month before I graduated high school. I had my 2nd child 5 years later when I was 22, and my 3rd child when I was 25. I’m 35 now and my baby girl will be 18 in May, and this year/age for her has bought up all sorts of issues for me and made me think about how I parent.

It has also bought up issues for my own mother, who I think sees my daughter as a second Mercury sometimes…She has long acknowledged that how she parented me contributed to my skipping school, sneaking out late at night, being ‘fast’, etc., but she also feels I ‘over-indulge’ my daughter and sons in reaction to her.

So what? I have had to bite my tongue many times during these conversations because I truly don’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings, but yes, I do mother my children in the way I wish I had been mothered. Quite a large part of how I am as a mother, as an adult, is in reaction to my mother.

For example my mother has poor housekeeping skills and doesn’t mind living in mess and clutter. If you remember my blog about my aunt who lives in squalor, keep in mind this is my mother’s twin sister. I have no idea why they both are like that. The only reason we did not live in outright squalor is because my father would not allow it and he would just give in and clean up. But we lived in mess and filth enough. We had roaches and piles of laundry everywhere, and I hardly ever slept on clean sheets and rarely had pillowcases, let alone clean pillowcases. My brothers did nasty shit like piss on the walls and my little sisters, when they were in diapers and/or had accidents, my mother would often leave the piss there and just let it dry. Why would someone do this? Eventually my dad had all the carpet pulled up, it got so bad.

My mother never showed the least embarrassment about how we lived, either. She would invite people over, including kids I had to go to school with. These same kids would make fun of our house at school. There were times I went to school in dirty and smelly clothes. There were times I had roaches crawl out of my bookbag. Imagine my shame and horror, imagine how the other kids reacted. So as an adult on my own I have always been careful to keep my home clean and insect-free. I have not always been successful, as I was poor and often lived in the hood in roach-infested apartment buildings, but I did my best. I have explained to my kids how I grew up and they do their part in keeping our house now clean and tidy. I love it when my house is all bright and shiny. When it is messy it can stress me out, big-time. I can’t stand a mess, it always makes me flashback to my home growing up, shudder.

Other things I do now as a mother in reaction to my mother include:

-making my kids’ school lunches, including my daughter’s. This drives my mother insane, she’s always going on about how i-bop is a senior and I should make her do it. My mother stopped making my lunches when I was in 3rd grade, ok, and not only that, she and my dad were hit-and-miss about keeping lunch supplies in the house! stuff like sandwich bags or anything to wrap my food in!

-making my kids’ breakfast every day. I don’t always make it from scratch, mind, they often have cereal. But I get it ready and just in general try to give them a good morning before school. My mother worked outside the home (she was a social worker, go figure about the dirty house) and she just didn’t bother with that, which I don’t understand. Even when I worked outside the home, when they were younger I would take them over my MIL’s house so she could do their breakfast. Now I will get it fixed before I leave, if I have to go to a meeting before they have to leave for school.

-Food all around. I have been a vegetarian since I was 14 but before that my parents would make me eat meat. So now I respect my own kids’ food choices and I have never forced food on them or coerced them into eating anything. My mom thinks I am very indulgent, especially regarding i-bop, but she is really sensitive about food and has always been a picky eater. I agree I can be indulgent, like I recently started buying cereal bars for her because she doesn’t like to eat early in the morning, but would eat those later around 9ish (she has to be at school by 7:40). I do have her drink a small glass of orange juice before she leaves, though, and I pack her a snack box for her after-school time like drama practice. My mother never did stuff like that…and I often had hungry days in high school. I can remember making fun of other kids whose mothers still made their lunches in high school but really I was just jealous.

-Yelling and spanking. We haven’t spanked the boys since ’99/00 and i-bop since ’96ish (and Mercury Man has never spanked her), but yelling continues to be a problem for me. I can go months without yelling then out it comes. This was how my mother was, she was generally very calm and easy-going but 3-4 times a year she’d go psycho and chase us around the house for a beat-down. When I find myself yelling I feel that’s going to happen to me, I’ll get beside myself and lose control. Plus yelling at my children is just not right.

-Hugs. This is one area my mother did right, she was very good at hugging us and telling us she loved us and giving us positive self-esteem messages…until we got to be teenagers. I still hug my teen frequently and I let her know I think she is fantastic, as I do with my sons.

-Respecting their space. I had zero privacy as a child, I couldn’t even have a shoebox to myself without my parents feeling like they had the right to go digging through it, and when I finally had my own room as a teen they would come and go in it as they pleased, bleh. I respect my kids’ privacy and have from very young ages. They know I will not go in their rooms without their permission, period. I have told them if I have any concerns I reserve the right to inspect, but I’ve only had to do that once.

-For myself pursuing my art as a writer. I believe everyone is artistic/creative in some way and mine is writing. My mother is an amazing artist and I wish she had pursued it or even start pursuing it now. She can draw portraits from photos or sittings, as well as amazing caricatures. She always wanted to be an artist but her mother and grandparents pushed her to go to college (my grandmother was a librarian and had a degree in library science) and get a degree in something ‘reliable’. Social Work was a reliable and stable job and one of the few professions open to black people at the time, so my mom and her twin chose that and that is what she did and continues to do.

I have talked to my mom about pursuing her art now and I even put some of her pieces on my website that sold! but she still thinks this is something she can’t/shouldn’t do…she is only 59, she turns 60 next month, but she acts as if her life is over. I think seeing how my mother has denied herself artistic expression is what has spurred me on as a writer no matter what, because I don’t want to be like her in regards to this.

There are more but I gotta go, will be back later. I’d like to hear how you parent differently than/in reaction to your mother as well.

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