Children won’t save a marriage—but they might fix your relationship with your mother
We lived in New Jersey, just the two of us—my mom and I. Although my dad made a guest appearance for this very important trip—my second visit to the university thousands of miles from home—it was always just the two of us. My parents divorced years earlier just as my bat mitzvah checks were cashed. So we navigated our lives together, a marriage of our own.
We both knew what it meant, choosing a college thousands of miles from home. She wasn’t wrong to think I was running. I knew what the optics of my decision looked like to everyone around us. But space didn’t feel like a choice to me after five years of rallying to piece her back together. Five years of meeting everyone’s expectations that I was her first line of defense, her support system, her other half. A child changes when she parents her parent. Shouldering adult burdens to fill the void of an adult relationship comes with these consequences.
Once I moved to university, we still saw each other. We furnished my first apartment in Target’s finest linens and screamed at the top of our lungs at SEC football games. We slept in my bed. She made breakfast for my roommates. And in my stuffed ’98 Altima, we drove straight from Gainesville to New York City so I could start law school.
My mom showed up. She always did.
Yet, my life was a mirror, a reflection back onto her own perceived misfortunes. The more I reached, the more troubled she seemed, as if the choices I was making were in spite of her—to not be like her. To be more like him. I was a snob for my New York City lifestyle, while she spoke so nobly of her friends’ children living at home, even the ones we knew were in bad shape. But, a child does not choose one parent to resemble. They produced me together. She couldn’t acknowledge that history without reliving its worst.
We were reaching a point where there was nothing left to say. Like we were speaking different languages about different priorities, different lives altogether. I questioned how we could move forward in this way or whether we were destined to drift apart. Until my water broke.
My water spilled, in fact, onto our bathroom floor. Thirty-five weeks into becoming a mother myself and I had already failed—at least that’s what it felt like in the aftermath of giving birth for the first time. Mt. Sinai Hospital discarded us onto a busy, cold and dark Upper Manhattan street three nights later. My husband and I hurried our daughter into my mom’s sedan circling the block. We inched cautiously in the bus lane back to our apartment.
Nothing felt right. Our tiny kitchen-bedroom was still filled with unpacked boxes, an unmade crib and unwashed clothes, which were too big for a four-and-a-half pound baby. The clothes were too big. The room was too small.
My mom made the sofa bed and pulled the stroller up next to us in the living room. We slept there on her first night home, me tending to her every hiccup, unsure of what to do. My mom laid next to me, holding my hand, letting me cry until sunrise.
I thought a lot about my relationship with my mom during my postpartum haze, when I was afraid to care for my newborn as if anything could break her.
Love and fear are too close to distinguish sometimes. We can love someone beyond a point where our conduct makes sense. My mom’s feelings about my life were not a referendum on me but were rooted in fears for her only child, which usurped all reason. In my first months as a mother, I understood this better than ever.
For my daughter, she rose to the occasion. Always showing up with diapers and Carter’s onesies. Together, we troubleshooted her transitions to the next size bottles and diagnosed her with gas before the pediatrician did. After spending weekends at our place, she would let me know the next time she’d be back as she walked out the door. I needed to hear it, in the same way she needed to feel a sense of belonging that I hadn’t been able to give her in years.
We all want to belong to someone. It’s hard to see that sometimes.
I have two daughters now. They are not a mirror to her—they are a door. The thrill of being a grandmother allows her to travel to the past, revisiting the early years of motherhood she loved so much. Instead of looking at me and seeing someone she doesn’t recognize, she looks at my daughters and can see me again. Through the silliness and play and milestones she shares with the girls, I see her again, too.
Some say that children can’t fix marriages. And as a product of a marriage I could not fix, I can confirm this. But children can save your relationship with your mother. Of course, she may not always appreciate what I do or say. But with our mutual purpose, we experience a new joy that moves us forward. Joy that is inextricably linked to one another. A mother, her daughter, and her daughter’s daughters. A new union for us all.
