Helicopter Mom

My mother arrived five days ago to visit and since then my son has been practically surgically attached to my leg. Not sure whether it's just the cold he has been battling or if he is taking a man-on-man defense in order to assure that the mama does not abdicate to big momma.

Sometimes I wonder whether there will ever be a time when I don't feel like I am a mother to everyone and everything.

Being a mother is such an intense thing-- it's at once the most powerful and powerless position to be in-- responsible for, though not in control of, others' happiness.

When I am exhausted (as I am now) I can almost not believe what I do in a day. It goes well beyond the creative (putting it kindly) meal planning and cooking required for a toddler, well beyond the preparation and the clean up and the staging of every practical transaction. It seems everything holds an emotional weight. Everything is learning (for him and me). There is the sweet predictability and the onerous predictability. There are the sweet moments of discovery and the excrutiatingly slow practice for discovery.

And all the while trying to both serve and stifle the instinct to make everything kind and good and better than it was growing up. In order to give your child the framework for hapiness and let him invent his own content, follow his own kite-strings.

And yet trying to not turn into the mother of all mothers; take too much responsibility everywhere else where it is unwanted, unasked or unnecessary. Like a bird thinking a mailbox is its nest and waiting for those chicks that will never arrive.

As my therapist once said, who do you think you are, Jesa?