“[Your mother] created you, so you always owe her and can never really repay the debt. Being born is like asking Don Corleone for a favor.”  – Dennis Miller

*

My mother tells me that is wasn’t her intention that my older brother and I be born only sixteen months apart. “But,” she adds. “It worked out just fine, didn’t it?”

I don’t know, did it?

Mom then describes my arrival as “unplanned but unprevented,” quickly deducing that I must have been planned on some unconscious level, or else wouldn’t she have been more diligent about birth control?  Mom never uses the word “unwanted.”  She looks over my head, into the distance, and I can tell she feels a little sheepish about the conversation – like she might offend me. Finally, she puts all the equivocation to rest with this bit of triteness:  “You were a pleasant surprise.”

Hmmm.  A pleasant surprise? Isn’t that what you say to someone who pops in late on a Sunday afternoon, just as you were about to drink a beer and climb into your hammock for a snooze?  You pretend you’re glad they intruded; you sit politely and watch them drink your last beer, which you of course dutifully offered to them, and you hope they are more fascinating than you predict, or that they won’t linger too terribly long, and that you’ll get that nap in after all.

Please, save me from pleasant surprises.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I grew up feeling loved.  I knew my mother took joy in my being.  But I also grew up knowing that I was a pain in the rear, a burden, another mouth to feed, a sacrifice, the guest who showed up uninvited one day and stayed a really, really long time.  I made long distance phone calls (back when they cost extra).  I ate the leftovers Mom had earmarked for lunch.  I ruined many a nap in my mother’s life.  And I knew it, and it was good for me to know it.

Recognizing the sacrifice required just for me to breathe on this planet taught me humility.  It also taught me that acceptance is bound up in love, and vice versa.  Whether or not my Mom sat down one day and premeditated – Let’s try for another kid before the last one is out of diapers and gee-whiz, I hope it’s a baby girl who cries non-stop for months – once I weaseled my way through the door, she took good care of me, and dedicated a lot of hours that might otherwise have been spent in a hammock.  She even managed to seem like she enjoyed it a good lot of the time.

I’ve carried on with this tradition.  I often acknowledge to my own children how simply annoying they can be.  I think it’s good for them.  Oh, I’m also always telling them what a blessing that are; I’ve run around for years worried about their self-esteem.  (Why else would I still display that clay monstrosity – Is it an ashtray? Is it a hotplate? – that twenty-year old Angus made when he was five? And what other reason could there be for attending pee-wee baseball?)  But too much of that you’re-so-wonderful-and I’m-so-lucky stuff is not good for anybody’s character.  It needs to be balanced with the other reality: your mother might worship you, but she is also a person who could be doing other things.

Take for example, the time my younger son, a lanky fourteen-year old, actually debated with me for seven days when his pants were getting short and I had the radical notion that I should buy the next size up.  He was convinced that the new pants would be too baggy, that he would look foolish, that all would be lost.  There were about twenty conversations that went something like this:

I assure him: “They’ll fit in length and then on a tighter adjustment in the waist.”

“No, they won’t.”

“Yes, they will.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.  They.  Won’t.”

We actually had to negotiate a deal wherein I agreed not to force him to wear the pants that fit, and only then was I permitted to purchase them for his consideration.  I thought he was going to hire a lawyer.  I think he would have, if I’d advanced him the retainer, which wasn’t an option because his damn pants are so expensive.  I silently reminded myself that attending middle school is like sliding under a microscope every morning and being viewed through a lens of impending derision.  I’m not cold-hearted – I sympathized with my child.

Then I said: “Son, you are irritating the hell out of me.”

And we were done.  I could have gone to my hammock for a nap, if I had ever, in my life, had time to get a hammock.

I allow for their emotions and stages – certainly.  But indulge them to the point of folly?  Nah.

This past summer, my daughter gave birth to her first pleasant surprise – I mean, baby.  And beforehand she wondered aloud about how her days would change.  I told her that she will have some of the most exceptional, wonderful moments of her life, but that, especially in the beginning, there are very few wonderful whole days, and that within the same twenty-four hours she might both adore and hate her new life.  It’s the obvious truth that nobody told me, that I don’t even really want to say aloud now, lest I seem unmotherly, unfeminine, ungrateful for my children, and unloving.  Yet all it really amounts to is an acknowledgment that having a baby is magical AND exhausting both, and a large portion of infant care is janitorial. It’s the bodily fluid watch.

It’s drudge work with angels.

We love it.  We live on it.  And it’s gross and demanding, and sometimes it’s just plain tedious.  Why is that so difficult to say? Jokes about your mother driving you crazy are easy enough to spew out – but we tiptoe around the mixed feelings children can elicit.  When did we become so dedicated to zero-defect anyway? Don’t we know that our blessings are also always our burdens?

I may have been a gift from God, but I was also a consequence of the flesh.  I’m okay with that.  The rhetoric surrounding how my visit to my mother’s house came to be is irrelevant.  What matters is what happened afterward: What did I take?  What did I give?  What did I learn?  And did I say thank you enough?

I don’t know, did I?  Can you ever say it enough?

Thanks again, Mom.

A version of this column was originally published at Port Folio Weekly

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