Chapter
ONE

How Do I Do This?

With his father’s help, my son completed the construction of a pinewood derby car for Tiger Cubs. Late one evening, he came to me requesting that I paint a thunderbolt on the hood of the car. While he offered specifically calibrated instructions at my elbow, I brushed a yellow zigzag over the red base coat.

Why? I’m a mother.

Daily I shuttle back and forth between swim meets and basketball practice. I go to the store to get stencils for a science project display board and to the doctor’s to get an X-ray for a sprained ankle, which turns out to be broken. Consequently, I become an expert in the art of applying and reapplying an air cast, all the while convincing the patient of the sensational benefits of wearing such a device when one would rather not.

Why? Because I’m a mom.

I send in applications to camp, search for stray socks, and review spelling words each Thursday night. I buy gallons of milk, brush tangles out of matted, chlorine-colored hair, and try to make myself invisible when I have to fold the laundry in the family room and my kids want to be alone with their friends. I monitor scooping out the cat litter box and emptying the dishwasher while resisting the urge to just do it myself, and read Ramona bedside.

Why? I’m a mom.

My mothering routine hasn’t always been quite so varied. In the early years my responsibilities consisted largely of making sure that my babies were breathing in the middle of the night and sleeping in the middle of the day. They seemed to require no help from me to eat, eat, eat, eat all the time in between.

Throughout the stages of attachment and separation, individuation and identity formation, a certain voice has challenged me from within. I remember it first during the months when we waited to become parents. It continued its insistent whisperings during those initial late-night feedings. On into the toddler years it spoke to me. And even now, on the steps of adolescence, it demands entrance into my days.

Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know how to be a mother?

In spite of the pink-and-blue-edged wonder of new parenthood, there is something terrifying about becoming a mother that lasts through all the stages and ages. When a baby is placed in our arms, we imagine that we’ll miraculously know just what to do, how to nurture, how to mother. We imagine an instinctive, fitting response to our child.

Such a response did miraculously materialize the instant I saw each of my children. I could hear Eva crying as my husband, Evan, and I approached the door of the adoption agency. We’d waited for four and one-half years for our precious daughter. I was bursting to know her, love her, mother her.

Inside, we found three-week-old Eva on a table. Just a hard, folding table like you’d find in any church banquet hall. She was lying on a thin blanket, arms reaching out, feet kicking slightly, and crying while the caseworker and the foster mom talked, ignoring her need.

My heart twisted within. Someone pick up that baby! Someone hold her!

I looked from caseworker to foster mom to my husband, Evan. But the response came from within me. Well, I’m the mother. And I marched over, picked up Eva, and bonded on the spot.

Sometimes I do instinctively respond to a moment with a mothering impulse. Like when I hear a loud noise, silence, and then a wail. My feet take me to the side of my child in less than five seconds flat. Did I fly up the stairs?

In those days of struggling to prepare a meal with a toddler and a baby, I never practiced my calisthenics, “Baby on the hip, bottle just so. Toddler down there—don’t step on his toe!” No. One late afternoon during the “arsenic” hour of dinner preparation time, while I was juggling and stirring and enduring a leg clamp, the phone rang. I reached for it, stuck the bottle under my chin to hold it and caught my breath in awe as I realized that God had created chins for a purpose!

Yes. An instinctive response within us motivates us maternally. But, to be honest, such a reaction surprises me. I want to be a good mom. But I’ve always seemed an unlikely candidate.

I grew up in a broken home. My parents were divorced when I was five. My older sister, younger brother, and I were raised by my alcoholic mother, and we saw our father only rarely.

From my mother I learned that creativity was my friend and that if I thought long and hard enough, I could think my way out of any difficulty. I gleaned a love for celebration and surprise through Christmases, birthdays, and friends. I discovered a love for reading and the blissful escape of journeying to other worlds through words. I grew in independence and in self-reliance and only occasionally turned to others for help. I became a survivor. A vigilant, fortressed queen of a kingdom over which I alone ruled.

These are the “upside” lessons of the “upside-down” reality of living with an alcoholic. I am grateful for them because they have been used to carve out the offering of character in my personhood where there might have been only deficits. But I have also come to see the negative aspects of these qualities as they can cut me off from intimacy and hide me in a warped denial of what is truly mature.

From my mother I learned to be strong and to protect myself. In her alcoholic absence, I sheltered my brother. I acquired confidence and leadership. I learned how to live. But I didn’t learn how to mother.