My Mother's Daughter

I am my Mother's Daughter

Word Count:560


         Abraham Lincoln is quoted to have said "Everything I am, I owe to my Angel mother." My quote would be more along this line; "Everything I do that makes my kids roll their eyes, my kids can blame on my mother."
         Ours is not a tale of sunny afternoons spent on a picnic blanket, baking cookies and giggling together, or long walks spent talking and sharing our lives. We did have some good times, but respect ran short on my end. I did not see her as a woman whom I would aspire to be. She smoked. She drank beer. She mothered six children. And we were poor, very poor. She remained married to a man that hurt her physically. I longed for her to be brave, to stand up to my dad and walk away with us. But she stayed and plugged along.
         My teen years were fraught with disagreements and power struggles. I was a good kid, not because I had been raised that way, I just didn't want to end up like my mom. I saw that I would have to be the opposite of who she was to make it out of the cycle of dysfunction. She was uneducated, so I made sure I made top grades. She drank, so I was abstained. She didn't go to church, so I was there every-time the doors were open. I worked to become her opposite, nearly her nemesis.
         One day my perspective of her was challenged and I was forced to view her through eyes that held objectivity. The question had been posed, quite innocently, during a psychology class. "If a war is raging all around you, does it take more courage to walk away or to stay and fight for what you hope will turn out right?" What I had seen as weakness was now revealed to be bravery on my mom's part. She, in the midst of the chaos of her life, saw what she hoped her life could be and refused to give up on it. Where I had seen fear to leave I instead saw hope for a better tomorrow. Where I had witnessed physical hurt, I saw sacrifice of her self for the sake of protecting her children.
         Not more than a week later, she came to visit me at college and I got the chance to talk openly with her. To test my theories I began to question her on some things, allowing her to speak her side of what she saw in our past. She revealed her struggles with her conscience on certain things, her fear of letting her kids down, her hope for her husband and then she said, "It all comes down to doing the best you can with what you have and believing that God will use it to make you a better person than I could create on my own."
         I am now a mom of four. I have done things that I am not always proud of. I've lost my temper a few times and said things I wished I hadn't, but I too am doing the best I can with what I have and believe that God will use everything to make them better people than I could create on my own. I am my mother's daughter.