The Original Mean Mommy: Why Being the Only Mother You Know How to Be is the Best Lesson My Mother Never Thought She Was Teaching Me

Confession time: The whole mean mommy thing? I stole the idea. Stole. It.

But it’s okay, because I stole it from my mother, the Original Mean Mommy:

When you've been a Mean Mom with your own kids, you get to be a Fun Grandma. Here she is blowing bubbles with James.

I think I may have written this in my first-ever post on this blog, but it’s an anecdote that bears repeating. When I was newly married but not yet a mother, I was musing aloud to my cousins about what kind of mother I thought I might be. “I have a feeling,” I said, “that I’ll be a lot like my mom.”

And my cousin Julia (herself then also a newlywed with no kids, and now the mother of four, newborn to age 6, bless her), said — before she could allow her brain filter to kick in and stop her —  “But Aunt Carol was so mean!”

Aunt Carol, a.k.a. my mother, was mean, in the sense of being exacting, scheduled, strict. Practical, not mushy. She ran our house with rules that were clear (if grating sometimes, and honestly, if they weren’t grating, what kind of kids would we have been? As I’m fond of saying, the parent provides the envelope; the kids push against it). But my late revelation has been this: She could not have done it any other way.

If there’s one thing my mother was — well, is — it’s true to herself.  She was the mother she had to be. She couldn’t have been another kind. That was just her. It’s taken exactly eight-and-a-half years of parenting for me (and I mean that precisely; as my Daniel pointed out to me this morning, it’s his half-birthday today) to realize her genius in quite these terms.

She didn’t decide to be a certain way as a parent. She. Just. Was.

And I’m finally starting to believe, the more I parent and the more parents I watch at their own parenting tasks, that it’s when we aren’t the parents we’re supposed to be that we get into trouble. I couldn’t be any other way but the way I am. You can learn stuff, sure. And you can research aspects of the job and make decisions on various things, but the vast majority of it requires knowing who you are and parenting as that person, no one else. I tend toward the practical, like my mother (hint: this is a major understatement); so trying to be less so would feel uncomfortable, inauthentic. I’ve never asked her if she considered and then rejected other general ways of being a mother, but my guess would be that I’d get one of those, “you kids today think too much” looks from her.

So. Without further ado, and with just a short time until another Mother’s Day is upon us, here are a few key tenets of mine that are liberally borrowed from the Original Mean Mom:

• Don’t apologize too much to your children. If you can’t do something, buy something, go someplace, or stay someplace, you may think apologizing is the right approach. But be careful how you do it. If your apology is abject (“I’m so, so sorry we can’t get you these boots, honey. You poor, poor dear”), beware, because you’re raising a potential professional victim. If you tell your child over and over that he deserves stuff he’s not getting, get ready to put in calls to college professors and bosses when things don’t go as Junior wanted them to. Apologize for the really bad stuff: the f-bomb dropped at breakfast; the mean-spirited gossip about the neighbor). If you can’t buy the boots? A simple, “I get you’re disappointed, but we can’t afford them” will do. Then go about your day.

• Don’t fight your kids’ battles. Tempting, I know. My mother never did this; she didn’t intervene in problems with friends or even minor issues with teachers or dance instructors or Girl Scout leaders. Notice I said minor issues. She let us work things out. Honestly, I doubt it occurred to her to step in  and, say, call a friend’s mom if I came home upset that Patti didn’t share her Barbie van with me. However, when the issues were major? She came out like a lioness. That’s the difference: I remember the times she (and my dad) went to bat for me. It made me realize that I could do a lot on my own, but that she had my back, big time.

• Make your kids do chores. I think I may have related this story before, too; how my parents had a penchant for moving the woodpile from one side to the other of the yard. As a little girl, I gotta tell you, it is no fun to pick up logs (with bugs living in between them), load them on a wheelbarrow, and move them someplace else to be re-stacked. In truth, maybe this happened twice. But we did everything else, too — inside and out. When I was 13, my parents promised me a new outfit for an autumn trip we were taking if I mowed the lawn all summer. I did it. Sucker? Maybe — but I can mow a lawn.

• Make dinner. Just one per evening. Left to my devices, I’d have eaten cheese-and-butter sandwiches and spaghetti every day. I did not get these foods every day. We had beef and spinach and stew and chicken and broccoli and — gag — liver and onions. I had to eat salad. I had to clean my plate. I still have no answers to whether this is always the right approach, but in my experience, it is. I guess it could have backfired, but in my family, it didn’t. My brother was an even pickier eater than I am, and these days he cooks farmer’s market vegetables I’ve never even heard of, and has been known to make his own sushi, for heaven’s sake. I err on the side of making foods my kids mostly like, and I’m lucky in that they do actually eat vegetables (if a frustratingly small group of them, plainly cooked). But I’m thinking my mother’s approach was right because it wasn’t about tip toeing around enticing kids to eat foods that were good for them. It was about practicality (the very idea of spending money and time on “kid” foods was anathema) and a hearty dose of “because I said so.”

So. That’s just a taste of what I borrowed, liberally, from my mother, so you could say that I’m trying to give credit where it’s due. Or you could say I want to say thanks to my mother, but given what I’ve realized here — that she had no choice but to be the mother she was — maybe “thanks” isn’t right.

What I wish you all this mother’s day? A clear-eyed look at the kind of mother you are because you have to be, and comfort and confidence in that.