An Ode to motherhood

My mom was recently scheduled for a surgical procedure and needed a driver to take her to her local clinic. Typically, my sister-in-law takes my mom to her appointments. After mom gave up her car. much of the transportation tasks has fallen to them since she and my brother live only a block away. This particular day, the appointment conflicted with my sibling’s families work schedule. Their employers unwilling to be flexible with time off, I was asked to help out. I too had to work, plus, I live three and a half hours away. We could have paid for a transportation service, but this was an appointment required someone to be present after the procedure and so I took up the mantle.

Many times, in my nursing career there wasn’t the allowance for taking time off even to meet my own young family’s needs. I am grateful every single day for the understanding and support I’ve received from the doctor who hired me at our integrative clinic and the doctor who took over the practice after my former employer retired. It’s a terrible reality, the lack of support healthcare workers receives when needing a day off to care for their families. The mandated presence in caring for the health and wellbeing of others is so demanding, the caregivers’ own needs are often ignored.

An Ode To Motherhood: My Mom

As I watched over my mom during her procedure, a sadness came over me witnessing her vulnerability. Once a strong, vibrant, feisty, independent and industrious woman, she looked pale and helpless lying there on the procedure table. My mom never had what you would call an easy life, emotionally or financially. I worried about her being alone afterwards in her two-story house with her three cats. I could only secure the day off to take her to the clinic, nothing more. Because of her end stage COPD, she can barely walk from the living room to the kitchen let alone performing her activities of daily living. How was she supposed to recover from a minor procedure? Yet, despite the hardships of living and coping with her chronic illness and co-morbidities alone, she manages to carry-on each day doing her best to care for herself, her home and cats despite the fragile appearances. She still has her mind and tenacity making her much tougher than she appears.

It’s difficult to know when or when not to intervene in my mother’s life. It’s easy when she asks for help. Difficult; when I see her making choices that will negatively impact her ongoing ability to stay in her home. Much like raising my own children, I have to respect her autonomy and accept that she may not always use what I would consider good judgement. After all, this was the woman who insisted I make my own way in life, not live across the street where I would remain dependent of her support and childcare. Learning from our trial and errors was how I was raised, a necessity in order to improve daily outcomes. It sounds poetically profound, theoretically. In practicality, it feels like a pending train wreck.

In my low moments, I sometimes wallow in self-pity, blaming my mother’s lack of intervention for my perceived life injustices, if it weren’t for a certain truth. There is no easy street on our life’s journey and our best lessons learned have come via the school of hard knocks. We all do the best we can with the knowledge and experiences we possess.

It is this core value which makes me appreciate my mom all the more. From the moment of birth, to present, my mom’s life has been filled with more lows than highs, but you wouldn’t know it. Even those close to her will never know the whole story. Someday, I hope to write a few more of them down. It is a very interesting read. For now; I will place my energies into easing the burden of which she carries, if I can.

In Closing

Mother’s Day shouldn’t be regaled to just one day out of a year. Flowers and chocolates, dining out or a phone call are nice, but it doesn’t hold a candle to calling or showing up when she doesn’t expect it. Due to the nature of my mom’s chronic illness, I don’t have many opportunities left to show her that I love her. I resolve daily to make the most of the time we have left. Life is too lonely to live with regrets.