Mother’s Day confirms the attitude of seeing our mothers as an everyday presence or remember them as a portrait of good. We forget it has it been an evolving relationship that has had a lot to do with our own success or failure in our attempts to grow to become successful adults.
We rightly assume that mom’s image of what is good and what deserves defending has generally been a steady view throughout our lives. What we do not often think about, as sons and daughters, is that we are the ones that have actively changed during different segments of our lives and that it is this that has affected the relationship.
There was a moment on a Saturday in an Ohio town when my father got so angry that he was about to hit me. That morning he had had a lot of trouble getting a Model-T Ford from the farm started and when we got to town, he told us not to turn the engine off.
But the curiosity of a 3-year old took over and I found a way of shutting down the engine. As my father was about to do something, my mother grabbed me and I held on to her for protection.
Although dad whipped me only once in my life, it was that threatened punishment on that day that I remember the most. At that moment, I saw my mother as a blanket of protection and as a shield of conspiracy to escape the obvious. It was clear that my world view as a toddler was the same as mother’s. I was intimately tied to how she reacted to things and how she made her vision real to me.
At the same time, I am convinced that what happened in that Ohio town that Saturday morning was an expression of a mini-rebellion that is so common among 3 year-olds. After that, my mother became both my protector and disciplinarian that took care of teaching and punishing my siblings and me whenever we did wrong in her eyes.
Childhood is a very busy time learning about a new world reality of books, school and the classroom that adds to the teaching done by parents, especially the mother. In my case, mom taught me to read and write in English and Spanish before I entered school.
Then there comes adolescence and the protracted struggle to grow up. It is a time when self-identity and taking control of one’s life is essential yet not possible because that power still rests with the parents.
At this stage of my life I had developed a deep love for basketball and yet mom did not allow me to stay after school for practice. It took me a long time to find a way of bypassing this obstacle.
In graduate school, I studied Analytical Psychology in preparation for my dissertation and found that adolescence is a period of rebellion against oneself, but more importantly against the parents because they symbolically stand in the way of one becoming a wholesome adult. In my adolescent life, there were times that I saw mom as the enemy and a “monster” that would not let me be me.
I was surrounded by walls at school, walls at home and a wall of poverty I could not escape. I found the real struggle of life. I went into the military at the age of 17. In time I realized how much I missed mom and those walls that had been long my protection.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of la Voz bilingüe. Comments and responses may be directed to news@lavozcolorado.com.
