Mother's Day finds me missing my own mother. It happens every year, that pang of loneliness for someone who was totally unique in my life. No one else can fill that void.
But it also finds me loving being a grandmother. There is no guilt in my relationship with my children's children. I'm not responsible for their development, their school performance, their chore completion. I'm only supposed to love them; and oh, how I love them.
I also have enough life experience to see the bumps in their roads as just that. Bumps. Not insurmountable mountains. Not depths from which they'll never emerge. Bumps. We all lived through them. This realization is not only freeing to me as a grandmother; it is hopeful in the broader sense. If our kids' pendulums can swing, isn't it possible that our cultural pendulums can as well? Isn't it feasible that the current lack of civility - a lack which is sadly apparent at all levels of our national character - might one day disappear? Isn't there the potential that we can stop condemning each other and begin to respect other ways of life, points of view, religious beliefs?
On this Mother's Day, I choose to hold onto that belief, even if I have to cling to it for dear life!
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