{"id":27681,"date":"2012-06-21T05:56:35","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T05:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=27681"},"modified":"2017-01-19T00:52:30","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T05:52:30","slug":"blessing-imperfect-mom-chana-jenny-weisberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/parenting\/blessing-imperfect-mom-chana-jenny-weisberg\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blessing of an Imperfect Mom"},"content":{"rendered":"

My neighbor Toby* was raised by a mother who suffered from clinical depression, and Toby was unable to forgive her.<\/p>\n

As a child and teenager, Toby didn’t even realize that her mom was different than the moms of her classmates, but when she became a mother herself at the age of 24, her fury at her mother for not having been able to provide the uncomplicated warmth and joy that she tried to provide her own child (and then children) tsunamied into full-blown rage for several difficult years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, though, two decades later, Toby has a strong relationship with her mom, and she has a very different view of the legacy of growing up with a less-than-perfect mother.<\/p>\n

Today, Toby is a popular parenting teacher who helps women become happier and \u00a0more skilled\u00a0mothers. In her classes, she frequently emphasizes the importance of self-care for moms and of taking care of ourselves emotionally in order to be the best possible mothers for our children.<\/p>\n

And she credits her career choice and the special impact she\u2019s able to have on her students to\u2026her clinically depressed mother.<\/p>\n

Which reminded me of an unforgettable story I heard from my parenting teacher Dina Friedman during her final class of the year:<\/p>\n

An old Chinese woman used to carry two water buckets that hung on both sides of a bamboo stick.<\/p>\n

One of the buckets had a hole in it and the other bucket did not, which meant that by the time the old woman reached her home from the well every day, the broken bucket was half-empty.<\/p>\n

After two years of spilling half its water, the broken bucket cried out to the old woman: \u201cI am so ashamed of myself that I am broken! I spill so much water!\u201d<\/p>\n

The old lady just smiled. \u201cDidn\u2019t you ever notice that your side of the path is full of many beautiful flowers while the other side is empty? Because of your hole, an entire garden has grown.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The perfect mother\u2026ahhh\u2026wouldn\u2019t it be wonderful to have one!<\/p>\n

But chances are your mother wasn\u2019t perfect. And chances are, also, that if you look you at yourself and your life, you will discover a surprising garden that has blossomed because of that broken bucket.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll see, maybe, that your emotionally absent mother ended up raising an emotionally present one. Or that your manipulative mother ended up raising a less controlling one. Or that your anxious and angry mother ended up raising a calm one.<\/p>\n

All week, I have been talking with people about the short story by Batya Ruddell in last week\u2019s Binah<\/em> entitled, \u201cAre You My Mother?\u201d The story\u2019s main character is raised by her father because her own mother is hospitalized in a mental institution as a result of a severe case of manic depression.<\/p>\n

This is the story\u2019s powerful ending:<\/p>\n

There are bits, I\u2019ve discovered, of mothers; little bits of love and nurturing from those who are not my own.\u00a0I\u2019m learning to recognize them, to put them in my pocket when I find them.<\/p>\n

[My husband] Leiby\u2019s mother is one of those parts, a large slice of a multi-layered cake.<\/p>\n

[My sister] Shaindy is another one of those pieces. She always was and always will be, even though I, her little sister, am growing up.<\/p>\n

Mommy is many slices, sometimes coated in frosting, sometimes in sweet, whipped cream. We\u2019ve been tasting our relationship slowly, taking tentative bites.<\/p>\n

And then, of course, there\u2019s my mothering of myself and learning that it\u2019s not something selfish or indulgent as I once thought\u2026..<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The work of a lifetime, isn\u2019t it? Transforming the curses of our childhoods into a lifelong blessing for ourselves and our children too.\u00a0Im yirtzeh Hashem<\/em>, with the will of G-d, we will.<\/p>\n

*Name has been changed.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Chana Jenny Weisberg<\/strong> is the\u00a0creator of\u00a0JewishMOM.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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