Who Sings This?

I distinctly remember making fun of my mom during my tenth grade year of high school--a period of relative tranquility in our mother-daughter relationship--about the fact that she didn't seem to know many of the facts of the Vietnam War even though she lived through this period of time. I couldn't understand how she didn't know the history except for at a very high level when she was an adult at the time and it was on TV and in the newspaper each day. What was she doing? Was she living under a rock? How could you be born and raised in Washington, D.C. and not know the details of such an ugly time?

Her answer? I was busy having kids.

As a 16-year old who was ultra-disciplined (at the time) and watched the Gulf War on TV each morning before going to school--and after reading The Washington Post--I guffawed and of course thought, "this will never be me".

And it wasn't me for years and years until one day, it just was and I found myself asking my younger son, Blake, "who sings this?" to every song he played. When he finally started showing irritation at my ignorance, it hit me like a ton of bricks--oh nooooo! It happened to me--I got motherhooded! While my news knowledge might have stayed current, my music knowledge had not. In fact, there's just a gap--big black hole of what happened in music in the last (if I'm being honest) probably 10 years.

I thought this happened to my mother because she was a stay-at-home during the Vietnam era and she was just too caught up in trying to be June Cleaver that news wasn't important to her, but this couldn't be the case because I worked the entirety of my sons' childhood and it happened to me, too.

But, what exactly, happens when you get motherhooded?

This phenomenon and the journey that motherhood provides--especially for women like me that I would put into the "reluctant" or "in denial" motherhood category--is what I want to celebrate. While my mission and my ministry is centrally focused on the mother-son relationship (well, because I have boys and it's all I know), I would shortchange both my sons and myself, if I didn't put this in the contextual framework of parenting, parent-child, and family relationships as a whole.

After all, how can I discuss being a mother without any connection to my own mother and to somehow weave her untold story into the bigger picture? How can I discuss my own evolution, or the evolution of the mother-son relationships that I hold without talking about our interconnectedness and the need to keep that attachment going?

While I have been trained to be logical and have struggled as to how to organize my work along with all of the services we provide because people "might get confused", or "it's too much for them", or my all time favorite feedback about myself--"it's like drinking from a firehose", I have decided to let it go and create for the other mothers out there who I am absolutely sure will not be confused, overwhelmed, or not follow because they are MOTHERS and once a mother, our brains and bones are forever changed and imbued with the incredible ability to absorb a multitude of simultaneous inputs while attending to a variety of tasks, needs, demands, and wants.

So regardless if you can recognize the latest top artist on Spotify, all mothers are singing their own song internally throughout their journey.

This blog is our song. Let's sing out loud and sing out strong.