HI MOM...

My mom and I

Who doesn’t love their mother? I mean, some mothers are harder to deal with than others, but a child will always love his/her mother, it can’t be helped. However, being a young maturing adult begs the question of what kind of relationship to have with your mother.

I’d like to preface this by saying, I am no expert on relationships, but I think I have a damn good relationship with my mother, so, here we go.

My mother and her mother have an interesting and dynamic relationship that dates back through many difficult memories of misunderstandings and communication errors. To this day, even though they speak to each other and are kind to each other, I believe both of them have trouble with the other one. To be more specific, I think both of them still question whether the other one loves them or not. Not good.

Thankfully, my mother refused to continue that cycle and made sure that I knew I was loved every day. In fact, she did this with all five of the children she has, plus all of our past and present (and, I’m sure, future) friends.

Giving you, the reader, this tidbit of information, I would hope to portray that it has been a difficult year moving out and separating myself from my mother. After graduation I had a difficult time finding what I wanted to do with the next 1 – 5 years of my life, much less the rest of my life. My mother had a lot of very good ideas and suggestions, and one in particular was going into the military. However, I, to this day, cannot wrap my head around joining the armed forces. This has been an ongoing battle, if you will, between my mother and I, and when I had nowhere to go except steady at Staples, she decided it was time to push a little harder.

I resisted, and resisted and resisted and resisted, until finally I sat down with her and listened to what she had to say. Why she kept pushing me. I was so busy fighting with her that I neglected to realize that she was trying to help me with the only solution she could think of. All I needed to do was communicate with her, express to her my concerns and beliefs on going into the military and where I wanted to go. She had no idea the dreams I had because I never told her.

My mother is very precious to me, as I’m sure most mothers are, and just because I disagree with my mom on some things doesn’t mean I don’t have a tremendous amount of respect for her. She has so many experiences under her belt and I will always listen, and then make my own choice.

What’s the moral of this story, you ask? Well, I hope you find your own moral, but mine is that it’s ok to disagree with my mother as long as I continue to listen. That’s what being a good “grown-up” daughter is about.