Don't Send Your Mother To Hell Just Yet

My mother has a Facebook.

I'm not sure why this surprises me at all. After all, even my dog has a Facebook. In fact, my mom and my dog are friends with one another on Facebook (even though they've never met in actual face-to-face terms - gotta love the internet). As for myself, well, I'm a 24 year old adult. I haven't lived with my mother in a very long time and while we're not as close as maybe I'd want to be, there's no hostility or anything. So, of course when I logged on to Facebook and saw that I had a new friend request, and upon opening that link seeing that this new friend request was from the very woman who'd birthed me, I did what any mature intelligent adult would do.

I left her in Facebook purgatory.

Now, for anyone not familiar with this term, Facebook purgatory basically refers to when you neither accept nor decline a friend request. This way, the option of acceptance is always still present, rather than declining and possibly regretting this decision further down the line, only to have to return the friend request, thus proving you'd declined them in the past (and again...gotta love the internet).

I think one of the reasons I haven't accepted my mother's friendship request is because...well...she isn't my friend. I remember noticing the lack of closeness we have for one another as early as the first day of kindergarten (how old are we then? Five?). I remember watching other children cling to their mother's waists while I wondered what the big deal was - after all, I'd been attending nursery school since I was three, my parents would go on week long vacations since long before that, so I knew the drill at this point. The other kids seemed to be receiving a lot of attention for these actions though so I started to whine and put my scrunched up game face on but before I could get through my first sentence, my mother leaned down and essentially told me to shut up or I was going to be smacked. Fine, whatever, you can't bullshit a bullshitter. I could deal with that.

And that's how it went ever since, really. Throughout grade school I recall being envious of my girl friend's relations with their own moms. Eating countless dinner's at various kitchen tables with other people's families. Being given the birds & the bees talk via a shoebox filled with a typed up letter and various packages and books left on my bed. Watching season after season, year after year, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek on our couch together just so that we'd have something to talk about, something we shared.

Do I think my mother was a bad mom? Yes, completely and 100%. Do I hold anything against her for this? No, not really. That's just who she is. She's not a bad person, and nothing she did was necessarily wrong. Just not the way most people would do things.

A little while back, I was asked what kind of mother I thought I would be. If I would raise my own children the way my mother raised myself. I answered that despite realizing the faults in my own upbringing, I'd more than likely carry them on to my own kids. Raising them with a detached hand, hiring housekeepers and Au Pairs (live in nannies) to do the job for me. It wasn't an answer given much thought or seriousness. After all, at the moment I'm 24 years old, broke and in debt, barely able to support my four legged "children" adopted off the street, much less an actual other human being. I don't see many Au Pairs in my future, except maybe as my own colleges.

There's no way to really know until you're in that position as a mother. My own mom sacrificed a lot, namely her own career and dreams, in order to give my brother and I the life which we had. And like I said, I don't hold it against her...I just leave her in purgatory. Which ultimately, is not where I'd want to be in my own children's future. I'd like them to think of me, and want me to be, more than just a friend of their dog's.