A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that my sister and I were not raised by the same mother. My sister, the firstborn, described the woman who raised her as someone who hovered over her, never letting her leave the front of the house when she played. She described my mother as someone who took too much disrespect from my father, and she recalled wishing that our mother would stand up for herself. After listening to her account of our mother in her early years, I thought, “Who raised you?”
The mom she experienced was starkly different from the one I remembered in my childhood. My brothers and I, birth order between two and four, were free-range children. We were in the streets—and by that I mean the parks, the stores and whatever else our bikes could take us. We often joked that our parents had no clue where we were. We just had three rules: stay together, do not enter anyone’s house and be home before dinner. As for the mom who did not stand up for herself, I never met her. The mom I know has a sharp tongue, and if she didn’t start it, she surely finished it.
By the time I’d come around, my mother had evolved. Just as her children were growing up, so was she.
The changes we experience in our mothers are often attributed to birth order; however, I believe it has more to do with where we meet our mothers on their evolutionary journey.
Best-selling author and therapist Esther Perel once said, “Most people experience three to four serious relationships in their lifetimes; if they’re lucky, they get to experience them with the same person.” I believe the same is true of moms. You should consider yourself lucky if you get to experience three to four versions of your mother.
I can say with certainty that my two children experienced different versions of the same woman. My firstborn had a helicopter mom. She was completely consumed with her role as a mother. Everything had to be done perfectly, which meant she had to do it herself. However, this came at a great cost to my friendships, marriage and goals. My then-husband and I had an episode of infidelity that rocked my world enough to help me understand the importance of having a life outside of motherhood. I know enough about my parents’ relationship to know that my mother and I share this part of our origin story.
The version of myself that my second son witnessed was born from this experience. This was the moment in my evolution where I reclaimed my role as the main character in my life’s story. Shortly after my second son was born, I returned to work in a fulfilling career, began dancing again, and required my children’s father to play a more active role in the labor of parenting and the household.
I used to beat myself up about not being the same kind of hypervigilant mom to my secondborn as I was to my firstborn. I thought that my firstborn had a better mom. As a first-time mom, I thought anything I did for myself was subtractive from my child, but what I learned over time was that anything I did of true benefit to myself reverberated into my family’s wellbeing, if not in the short-term, in the long-term.
As a result of taking better care of myself, I found a community of people and friends who played an active role in my children’s village. People who shared their gifts and talents with my children, people who opened their homes to my children and gave me space to breathe and pursue my dreams.
One of my favorite quotes from James Baldwin is, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they never failed to imitate them.” This quote made me question how society defines a “good mom”—should mothers be self-sacrificing, tirelessly caring for their children and partner at the expense of their own health, wellbeing and additional life purposes? What happens when the next generation starts to internalize these messages of martyrdom, or when our sons create expectations from them? Is this really what we want the next generation to imitate?
Leaning into Baldwin’s wisdom, when responding to the question of who received the better mom, I say both of them did. While I am no longer a helicopter mom, I am a fully alive mom, a healthy mom and a better supported mom, and they both get to experience this version of me. While I neither watch over their every moment nor try to prevent every possible mishap, I do let them try, fail and fall, but I am there to dust them off and process the lesson. I let them do it themselves and develop competency and confidence in their abilities without me jumping to the rescue.
Instead of seeing their mother perpetually model motherhood as martyrdom, my sons witnessed their mom blossom into a multifaceted human being. They got a father who plays a more involved role in their care and the care of the household, something critical for them to see as young men learning about their role in a family. They got to experience their village expand and their mother smile more. As I loved myself better, that love rippled into a better-loved family. If there’s anything I want my children to imitate, it’s that: knowing that as long as they are breathing, they can evolve, love themselves better and drop old ways of being that no longer serve them.
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