Hellobee

When I first found out I was pregnant, I immediately adopted a parenting mantra – I will not be anything like my mother. I have no idea why this became my mantra. My mom is one of the most amazing people I know, and I have endless respect and admiration for her as a person and as a mom. But in my newfound anxiety over becoming a parent, I immediately focused on traits that I didn’t appreciate rather than those I did, and I carried this with me.

Over the course of my pregnancy and even more so in the first year of Baby C’s life, I took a stance that pretty much everything my mom did was wrong and everything I thought and felt was right. Clearly, given my first time parent status and my mom’s 30 years of experience as a teacher and a parent of 2 kids, I knew better. I asked her to stay home when I ended up being induced at 36 weeks, and not to come when Baby C was born 4 weeks early at barely 4 and a half pounds and had to stay in the NICU for 10 days. When I did finally let her visit, toward the end of Baby C’s first month of life, I assumed everything she did, from deep cleaning my house to making me eat real meals to insisting on putting Baby C to bed so that I could sleep, was an indictment of my parenting.

It wasn’t until Baby C was just past her first birthday that I began realizing just how awful of a person I turned into postpartum, especially to my mom. I know now, 3 years later, that it was mostly driven by postpartum anxiety – I was always a very anxious person, without a medical diagnosis of such, and becoming a parent – especially a NICU parent after a very abrupt, earlier than unexpected birth – only exacerbated those anxieties along with all sorts of new ones. By the time I came to a place where I could begin to really deal with the person I’d become and the symptoms that had brought me there, I had done a lot of damage to the relationship with the woman whose only intention was only to help me as much as she possibly could.

Over Thanksgiving one year, when Baby C was 18 months old, my mom and I had a very long talk, brought on by me being extremely worked up over Baby C missing a nap due to the drive to my parents’, and the ask from my husband to let Baby C spend the night at his parents’ house (we divvy up our visit time since our parents live within 20 minutes of each other). Thankfully, I was finally in a place where I could actually hear her tell me how damaging my behavior was to my kid, my husband, to her and especially to myself, and in a place where I could finally take a breath and say OK, it’s time to start letting go.

Thankfully, because she’s Mom, she gave me countless chances to get my act together. Postpartum anxiety and depression aren’t things that my mom grew up with, having become a parent and gone through our newborn years in the early 80s in Russia, where no one really talked about these things or even diagnosed them as anything more than just baby blues and new parent struggles. I had a hard time seeking help for myself for similar reasons. After all, my mom raised 2 kids in a country where food was scarce, the political environment was unsteady, and basic life needs were barely met, and then moved her entire family to a whole new country, lived through career changes, prolonged unemployment, financial struggles, adapting socially and culturally, and so on. And here I was, with literally any resource I wanted at my disposal, and I needed extra help? I realized, however, that I needed to talk in order to deal with the things that weighed on me, and I’ve been talking and working on being a better parent, a better wife and a better daughter ever since.

My mom lives a few hours of a drive away from us, and she works full time and has a part time weekend job, so visiting us is not realistic very often, and we don’t go their way very often due to our own full time jobs, limited time off and having to wrangle a very active toddler through 10 hours of driving. But over the past 2 years, my mom has come to stay with us for a week in the summer, when Baby C’s daycare was closed, and for a handful of weekends in between, and gave Mr. Carrot and I our first weekend away from Baby C and then our first short vacation together as well. And in that time, I’ve been working diligently (though still not perfectly), at letting my mom do what she does best – be an incredible grandparent to my daughter.

On her most recent visit, I found myself marveling at my mom’s ability to put my daughter into such a calm state that she falls asleep a half hour or more earlier than she usually does on other nights. It’s a bit ironic – one of the reasons I was so determined to not be my mom is because my mom can be very intense. She’s very direct, blunt, sharp and she won’t hesitate to judge and tell you that she’s doing so. She’s also an anxious and impatient person, like me, though she probably wouldn’t admit it. But with my daughter, she becomes one of the calmest, most patient people I know. Perhaps because she’s parented 2 kids herself, and countless others as a kindergarten teacher, she has this parenting thing down to a art. Perhaps because we all behave differently around kids.

No matter the reason, I’ve been watching my mom finally be the grandparent she should have been from day 1, and I’m realizing that one of my greatest accomplishments would be becoming much like my mom, if I could ever pull it off. No matter how soft spoken and calm I am during Baby C’s bedtime, I can’t recreate whatever magic my mom creates that gets Baby C to calm down and fall asleep faster. I don’t have the seemingly endless ability that my mom does to make spoons of food into airplanes when Baby C is too distracted to eat; to make games out of cleaning up that make kiddo actually want to do it; to tell stories and sing songs out of a huge repertoire of classics that my mom seems to just hold in her head.

Watching my kid together with her Bubbie makes my heart soar. I try not to dwell on the massive regrets that I have over not letting my mom be my ally earlier – I missed out on a lot as a result. But I’m glad I got a chance to make things right. It’s given me this amazing opportunity to remember just how fantastic of a mom I actually have, and how much I actually have to aspire to. I’ll never be her carbon copy – I think I bring a lot to this parenting thing myself, now that I’ve stopped being my own worst enemy – but learning her magic would make me that much better, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to try.