Historically, moms are total know-it-alls. That’s what they’re supposed to do; they have the answer for anything. As we grow up, we come to realize that many times our mothers were, um, lying to us. About lots of things. Not maliciously, but they did make a lot of things up.
Santa? The Easter Bunny? The Tooth Fairy? (I’m just now realizing that many of these lies took the form of characters. I’m not even going to begin to analyze what that means.) My thinking is that moms do this because they know we need to see them as someone with all the answers. Kids do need that, I think.
One of the fun parts about growing up is realizing all the things your parents were wrong about. Maybe it’s because we fought with them so much as teenagers, but there’s something really satisfying about discovering your folks were mistaken at some point. But alas, getting older also means figuring out all the times we fought our parents on things that turned out to be completely sound and solid advice. Such as…
Eat your veggies
She nagged you about eating your broccoli before you had ice cream and as it turns out, she was right. I think we all hit that wall our freshman year of college where we’ve stuffed ourselves with so much pizza and beer and forgotten entirely what a vegetable looks like…and then we feel awful.
And then we eat one salad and feel great and the whole picture starts to come together. When you’re mother was urging you to eat the healthy things that gave you the icks as a kid, she was really trying to train you for the lifelong need you would have to take proper care of your body.
Don’t worry so much about boys; focus on school
Hell, replace “school” with “work” and you’ve got the advice I give myself every morning when I wake up. When we’re young, the first thing that ever gives us a real surge of hormonal emotion is interest in the opposite (or same) sex. It’s a real high…obviously trivial concerns like school should be put on the back-burner in favor of perpetuating those great and amazingly terrible feelings of romance and longing.
The sad truth is, mostly, if we let ourselves, we’ll be stressing out that much about relationships and love until the day we die. At a certain point, you have to make yourself stop being entirely preoccupied with that stuff and get busy with the other parts of life. You grow up a bit and your receptors for feeling get a little more sensitive and finely tuned. You realize that you can feel rewarding emotions for a whole lot of things that have nothing to do with sex.
Family time
Oh man, I remember being so annoyed with my mother’s insistence that we all have lots of “family time”. My immediate family consisted, usually, of myself, my mom and three other sisters. That’s a whole lotta girl power. And while we usually had fun, all of us kids usually would’ve preferred to be off with our friends or reading or running around the woods somewhere.
What I’ve realized since then is that our parents had something back then that we absolutely couldn’t have had: the experience of living longer. Living longer means they had seen that life goes by quickly and people move on to new parts of life and people even die at some point…the time during which the family you’re born into is all under one roof is a relatively fleeting phase. And it’s a pretty remarkable one. You develop so much of who you are from your family.
After you’ve done the rebellious thing, and the independent thing, there will probably come a time when you sincerely crave being around the people who are connected to you and know you best. Of course, by then, it won’t be nearly so easy to gather them all under one roof as it was when you were young.
