Letters from Home

 

I have been thinking about my changing role as a mother. The memories of babies’ days belong to parents. These bundled-up, nestled memories of our babies have become a treasure to me. I’ve written before that I consider these memories a gift that is uniquely mine. No one else will ever know exactly how it felt to be the mother of baby Paige, Daniel, Timothy, and Mark.

The middle years are full of shared memories. We can have dinnertime conversations remembering these times together. These are the playground years, the dance lesson and baseball years. I have loved these years, too. 2009 was a very special year because I realized that my children were all old enough to have adventures together and we did! We traveled over Arizona, exploring, learning, dancing, reading, and playing.This is my last year with two children in elementary school. These are such fun years!

The high school and middle school years have now arrived, where much of my children’s lives is a mystery to me. I don’t see them in their classes or how they interact with friends at lunch and I am not part of their recreation or social life. There are fun things about these years, too, such as Prom invitations, fun with friends, driving, and bigger achievements. I mourn the loss of time together, but I know it is good that they are growing independent and strong.

I invested that effort in their early years to help them to achieve this independence. I trusted that a good start would help them to be strong later. I never doubted the value of my role in their lives when they are young. Now that they are older and my role is less prominent, there is more insecurity. Did I teach them enough? Did I smother them? Are my questions about their school day enough to maintain a relationship? Did I just embarrass them in front of their friends?

As I move to a different place in the universe of my teenagers’ lives, I welcome assurances of the continuing worth of my role in their lives. Literature is a good comfort to me, as I can find these written words accessible whenever I need them. Several authors have become my midnight friends when the world is asleep and I need a conversation. Such questions as, “Do my little efforts really make a difference?” and “Is my work still a great work even though it’s backstage?” are important questions to me.

I finished Middlemarch last night. There are many themes that I enjoyed, but the reason I read the book was to study its heroine, Dorothea. A few of the last passages of the book meant a lot to me in my current thoughts.

Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done.

 

and…

 

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature…spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.

I’m not sad about the changes in my mothering. I am just going through a period of adjustment. If I focus on the principle of “incalculably diffusive influence,” I feel much more centered as I navigate these new roads from the concrete acts of mothering to the intangible. It’s a shift in ownership of memories. The baby time is mine, the middle years are shared. Their later years are increasingly their own, but a parent’s influence is forever.