Post Mother's Day Thoughts of an Aging Parent

Being an aging parent can get tough on holidays, and especially hard on Mother's Day. Gone are the Mother's Day mornings when those excited 8 year olds bring you your breakfast of cold toast and tepid coffee, or the proud 12 year old presenting you with the surprise present she had carefully saved for out of her allowance. Such memories invariably bring tears to my eyes.

We miss those earlier days, and no amount of phone calls, cards or flowers from our adult children today can possibly envelop us in the same sense of love and closeness. Sometimes the missing evokes irrational thoughts, such as, "Had I been a better parent, my children would care about me more." Or we might lay the fault at our children's door for not being more attentive to us.

The truth of the matter is that our children have become adults with their own families. They love us not less but differently because we are no longer the central focus in their lives the same way we used to be. At least, this is the state of affairs if we had done our jobs correctly and raised our children to be independent and capable adults. Our sons now have the job of helping his children honor their mother on her special day, and our daughters deserve to be the center of love and attention of her family.

If we can accept this inevitable turn of events in our parenting careers, we and our children would all be winners. Our relationships can be based on love and duty rather than obligations and guilt. Not that I won't still have tears in my eyes over my parenting memories, but that kind of sadness is transient, inevitable and even necessary for becoming not only older but also wiser.