Motherless Mothering

I have to tell you that when it comes to this "being a mom" thing, I am winging it. I know I am doing a good job, but there are times when I feel like a ship lost at sea. A lot of young-ish mothers often feel this way and then have the luxury of calling her own mother for direction, advice, and to be talked off the crayola colored ledge. It's a good thing I have facebook and some amazing friends. I don't have a mother I can call. It sucks. Totally.

To make up for this, I read parenting books. Can you just picture me in my living room with Natalia? I read a paragraph, then peer over the book at her thinking "Mmmm hmmmm. Maybe that explains....." The bottom line is I just don't know. She seems well adjusted and normal, but I have nothing to compare it by and sometimes I end up needling the issue to death. Jeremy loves it when I do that. It's a good thing for Natalia that I have him to step in sometimes and tell me to just let it go. I don't always take that advice, but I will back off my neurosis a bit - for a while.

Here is my point that gets me really fired up, and scared all in the same breath. How can a mother just let her child go? I'm not talking about empty nesters. I'm talking about a mother thinking that her child is independent and stable enough to really "not need" a mother anymore. I can't imagine feeling that way about Natalia, but a lot of parents do. Hell, even my dad thought geography was too much of a bother to keep up a relationship when I moved across the country. Natalia is my heart. I can't imagine her not being an important part of my day, but then I worry that I will be like them - a lazy parent, too busy in my own life to care about my adult child. It makes me a little more diligent in my day to day.

I do have to mention that Jeremy has a great mother. She is definitely his go to person with parenting questions. She is amazing, but she is his, not mine. I love her, but it's different.

A lot of my personal parenting (the part not from a parenting book) comes from doing the opposite of how I was raised. I won't call her names (boogerface doesn't count. That's a term of endearment), I will never slap her in the face, I won't put her in a position where she has to parent me, I won't ever think that just because I have raised a self assured adult that she will no longer need a mom.