A mother can only dream of the day her children will look at her as something other than a monolithic larger-than-life force or something other than the one who failed in oh so many ways to be the mother that particular child wanted. However loved, it seemed that Clarissa kids had nothing but criticisms. Clarissa should shop somewhere other than Goodwill. She should dye her hair so she didn’t look so old. She should not engage in embarrassing conversations with each and every person they met on the street. She should understand that short shorts or tattoos were not necessarily the sign of a slut. She should not spend a half hour giving them admonitions of how to be careful each and every time they stepped foot out of the house. She should not ask them what they are doing every time they walk across a room. She shouldn’t have such outdated opinions on dating or pretty much anything else. There really was no pleasing her children, so she just kept on driving them to band practice, cooking them dinner, driving them to wherever they needed to go, buying them clothes (of their choosing), and, let’s not forget, providing them access to the internet in the house. That might be her most important role, Clarissa reflected, mother as internet service provider.
But Clarissa knew that, if she was lucky, when her kids turned thirty or so, perhaps a bit later, their view might change. Her view of her own mother had mellowed and become quite a bit more positive. All the indignities visited upon her own childhood and adolescence had gradually been replaced by new interpretations as she had begun to see the actions from her mother’s point of view. She had had her own list of resentments: Being kept home from school until at ten, being made to sew endlessly, being made to wear out-of-style baggy clothes in the interests of modesty, being forced to live in a small backwater town, being forced to spend 18 hours on local buses when she traveled to the boarding school because that route saved a few pennies over the direct buses that would have gotten her there in a couple of hours, not being allowed to see movies or go to camp or read fiction. Oh, and having her diary read! She had never inflicted any of these travesties on her own children, but they were just as full of complaints and resentments as she had been. They, of course, expressed theirs more clearly than she had. Mostly, though, Clarissa resented her mother’s constant criticisms. Nothing she did ever seemed to be quite good enough.
It wasn’t that Clarissa had actually forgiven her mother for any of this. It was just that her mother had become more real to her somehow, more a person full of thoughts and desires and foibles and yearnings and worries. Everything that she had done in bringing up Clarissa and her siblings came from a logical place in a quite human hodgepodge of virtue and weakness, of humility and pride, a hodgepodge that included a great deal of love.
