Mothers Day, huh?
I’m not sure there is a holiday about which I have more mixed feelings, unless it’s maybe Fathers Day.
I never knew my father, who disappeared before my third birthday and was never heard from again. In fact, I never knew most of my relatives on that side of the family. My paternal grandparents, including a step-grandmother, all died before I was born. I did have two maiden aunts who were my grandmother’s sisters. One lived till I was 9 years old and the other survived about 10 years longer.
My mother remarried when I was 6, to a very fine man who was my dad for more than 50 years. He died in 2008, and a year and a half later my mother came to California for my son’s wedding.
The night before the wedding, Virgile got up at the rehearsal dinner to offer a toast. In a very pleasant surprise, he stood up and said what wonderful parents Nicole and I had been. He said we were the best parents in the world.
I turned to my mother and told her I was more proud of the job I had done helping to raise Virgile and his older sister Pauline than anything else I had ever accomplished in my life.
Imagine my surprise when she said bitterly, “But you don’t think we were good parents.”
I responded by saying I had never said that, and she responded quickly with, “But you think it.”
I wish we could have had a conversation about it that wouldn’t have hurt her. She lived 11 more years and although I was 70 when she died, we never talked about it. I wish I could have told her that they were wonderful parents at the real crisis points in my life. They came through for me again and again and never told me that was it.
But I would also have to tell her that on the small stuff, the day to day stuff, they were exactly the opposite. They turned me into the King of Passive-Aggressivity. They wouldn’t let me get my driver’s license when I turned 16 because my grades weren’t good enough, so when they finally said I could, I said no thanks. The first time I drove for a date was the Senior Prom.
Who is the best mother I know of? I would have to consider my maternal grandmother, who I often say is the best person I have known, but as a mother?
No doubt it is my wife Nicole.
For nearly six years between 1987 and 1992, she was a single mother with two children and a very demanding career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her children were 7 and 2 at the beginning of that time, but every evening, no matter how tired she was, she spent an hour with each of them doing what they wanted to do. She took them sightseeing around Southern California every weekend.
She was a world-renowned planetary scientist making discoveries that mattered, but she put almost as much effort into being a great mother. When I came on the scene to be a dad of the step variety, I started out doing some of the same things my parents had done to me.
“Don’t run in the house.”
Nicole asked me why that mattered. She told me if something bad happened because someone ran, we could discuss it again. But more than anything else, what mattered to her was not destroying the children’s spirits.
She was so supportive of the children that when there was trouble at school for either of them (very rarely), she requested that I be the parent to go in and discuss it because she wouldn’t tolerate anyone saying anything bad about her children.
If I became a good dad, and I think I did, it was because I learned so much from my wife.
She is without question the best mother I have known.
Second best is probably our daughter, but we’ll wait till next year to tell that story.