More Than a Mother

I bore nine children.  We also had 2 foster children for four years each.  I was blessed to be able to stay home to raise them.  Being a mother was my life.  Everything I did revolved around my family.  I loved being a mother.  I found value in caring for my children.  I provided opportunities for them to grow.  I was a soccer mom, watched over piano practicing, worked in the PTA and put on plays and musicals with their 

fellow gifted children at school.  

I took my children to museums, on hikes, on field trips and to operas and plays.  I taught them to work, to cook, to sew.  We camped and visited the beach and the mountains. I provided the materials and space and time for them do art and craft projects.  We had family times, went to church together, played together.  

I had my children in the days when “zero population growth” was the cry, but I knew that my children would be an asset to the world, not a drain.  They would solve problems, not create them.  As a mother, I would help them become all they could be.

Then one night our oldest son, 16 years old, didn’t come home.  The next day we got a call from a policeman in a town far away.

Our son had run away.  In the course of the next few days, we found out he was using drugs.  We put him in a long-term family-intensive drug treatment program.  It took a long time, but eventually the glow came back to his countenance, and he was clean and happy.  He finished high school and went to college.  But slowly, over the next two years, he slipped back into the druggie life.  He struggled, the light in his eyes went out.  He hated his life, and again we got a visit from a policeman.  Our son had shot himself.

Among the many terrible repercussions of that act was one I didn’t expect.  I lost my identity.  

I had been a mother.  That was who I was.  Now I was a failure as a mother.  I had failed my son.  I felt I no longer had any worth.  I was obsessed with the “should’ve, would’ve, could’ves.”  Even though my four oldest children were doing well, the three youngest were struggling with the aftermath of their older brother’s suicide.  I no longer felt that I knew how to raise them.  I doubted every decision I made with my younger children.  What if I failed them too?  If I wasn’t a good mother, who was I?  I had to re-identify myself as a person.

A statement by Boyd K. Packer started my metamorphosis.  

He said “The measure of our success as parents…will not rest solely on how our children turn out.  That judgment would be just only if we could raise our families in a perfectly moral environment, and that now is not possible.”  

Maybe I had been a good mother.  Maybe I could still be a good mother.  And maybe I could be more than a mother.

It took several years and a conscious effort, but I now see myself as a more complete person.  I am still a mother (and now a grandmother).  I have relearned to trust my inner voice.  But I am also a child of God, who loves me.  I am a wife to a wonderful husband who sustains me.  I am a daughter and sister.  I am a friend.  When my youngest entered college, I went to work at a university lab.  

I am a scientist.  I began writing.  I am a writer.  My husband and I went on a Humanitarian Mission to South America.  I am a missionary.  I am a woman of many facets, who is also a mother.  

I am me.

Who are you?