Oh Mama, Obama!
One of the thoughts that churned through my mind during President Obama’s speech today was how he is largely alone in this world. He’s a relatively young man, and yet his parents and grandparents have passed away. There is no one who brought him up who watched him by the Capitol today and thought, I did that! I helped him tie his shoelaces, I punished him when he was bad and rewarded him when he was good, I passed my values on to him and look where he is today!
I wonder if there could be a greater achievement as a mother (or father) than to see your child grow up to serve his country in this way.
I wonder for parents who send their children to war, if they feel this kind of pride or only fear.
I wished his mother could have been alive to see him today. This woman who had a baby so young with a man who was not a good life partner, yet she raised that child well. A patchwork family who suffered from instability and insolvency and yet instilled in the young Obama a sense of service and imagination and possibility so enormous, he lived to be the first Black President of the United States of America.
Wow. What a day.
It makes me think: what do we want for our own children? We want them to find love and happiness. We want them to be successful and to believe in their power. We want them to understand how to work hard, and how to relax. Are these things we teach them? Each and every day, we model for our children the behavior that they will either reflect when they grow up, or reject.
How much are parents responsible for how their children turn out, and how much is it a fluke? If you accept credit for their successes, do you accept blame for their failures?
For me, the single hardest thing about parenting is taking myself out of the equation. Bad grades are not a reflection of poor parenting. Eating fish for dinner is not a reflection of my excellent parenting skills. Getting them to make the bed does not make me a great mother, just as failing to get them to brush their teeth does not make me a bad one.
All I can do is the best I can do, and hope that my children make me proud.