Strength and weaknesses.

I found that it is easier to love my mom when I don’t expect her to care about the way I feel.

No, this isn’t about me being negative. But, it’s about perspective, and it’s about understanding and it’s about not being upset or angry anymore. It’s about forgiveness.

Yesterday, my mom found me sitting with my face in my hands and so she asked me what was wrong. I told her all my feelings, which resulted in her basically telling me to suck it up. The she walked out on me, like she usually does. If I was sick, she would do something, but, if it’s my crazy heart on my sleeve-ness, it’s highly likely that she won’t. I took a deep breath when she left and planted my face in my hands again. Even though I knew that I didn’t feel better, I knew that I could handle it. I knew that it wasn’t my fault. I finally was able to remember that it isn’t because I’m too much, it’s just… my mom isn’t a emotionally vulnerable person, and that’s okay. She’s not the type of person who wants to know how to make me feel better when I’m about to have an anxiety attack. She’s not the type that is willing to be vulnerable as naturally as I can be. It’s not okay, but at the same time, it is okay, because we’ve all been through different things, and we all know different things. We all have different strengths and weakness. And, that is also okay, because there is a love that covers her weaknesses, a love that covers all of our shortcomings. So, I stopped holding against her an expectation to be strong where she has always shown herself to be weak.

My mom has supported me in many ways, and I am thankful for how she has cared for me all these years. When I was a baby, she would change my diaper as soon as it got poopified. She didn’t wait or procrastinate. She made sure I was clean. My mother makes sure that I am safe (despite my impulse to want to take risks), that I am healthy, and that I have the things I need to succeed. We get snow cones together sometimes and we laugh together about things us Panamanians comment on. She let me try out an expensive art school which she took out a portion of her retirement fund to help me attend. And even though she isn’t thrilled about me going to Mission Year, she’s allowing me to go. I have learned the valuable lesson to not place on her what she doesn’t have and what she doesn’t know how to give because in being able to stop that habit, my eyes have been opened in a way that has allowed me to see and be thankful for all the ways that she has given me life and loved me in the ways that she knows how.

I also found that it is easier for me to love my dad when I don’t expect him to care about my emotional or spiritual journey as well. I know that I have a real Father who will care for my every need and knows my most intimate longings, and I am beginning to be open again in continuing to live shamelessly, with the knowledge that there are people in the world that have gifts that will encourage me and help me grow to be myself. I know that there are women I can go to who are willing to listen to my doubts and root me on with my crazy dreams. I am thankful for those men and women in my life who have those gifts to encourage me in those ways, and it is okay if my mother doesn’t have the gifts that they have, because she has her own that are just as important.

Things have really changed in my heart and in the way I see my mother ever sense I have come home. I am so thankful, if anything else, among the crazy house-hopping I had endured in Savannah, that I had met a woman, who, instead of straight-out judging or gossiping about my hardship, she took the time to understand. She let me rant, cried out her solidarity cry of “me, too!”…. and then she shared her wisdom with me. She understood, because she went through it herself. She told me her story, and she ended upon sharing with me that several years later, there are still things that she can’t run to her mother for, but she is able now to appreciate her mom for who she is now, flaws and all. Even more so, she and her mother have started to see ways that they can celebrate each other, by allowing themselves to see each other, to take little steps to care about the things that don’t come as naturally to them, allowing them to grow together.

It was a fault of mine to expect a parent to be able to have it all: to be perfect, just as it was a fault of my mother to expect me to be perfectly like her. My mom isn’t a superwoman; none of us are. We are just human.

I don’t want my future children, or even my baby-sister, to have to harbor a sense of opposition and neglect towards me for failing to understand the necessity of grace and forgiveness. Even if we have been hurt, we are not victims, because we are whole human beings, we are deeply loved by One more gracious than we’ll ever be. Even if I can’t be best friends with my mother, like my mother is with my grandmother, I can finally be her friend, because I’ll take her as she is, knowing that I have a Friend who takes me as I am.

And this is one of the many revelations I have been bombarded and blessed with sense finishing my freshman (and maybe my only?) year of college! Woop woop for growing! :)