Sunday, May 10, 2009

Happy Mother's Day!

A friend once told me that being a mother is getting used to living with your heart outside of your body. I always thought that being the heart was the easy part of the equation. In fact, I always wished I had a sibling to share my mother’s love with; for, her endless care, her constant worries, the joy that radiates through her eyes when I am within her sight, the sound of her voices on the phone, the depth of her silences used to be a big burden on my shoulders.

Then, four years ago, after forty-eight hour of excruciating pain, a tiny package of veins, blood, and organs walked into my life. I held her on my chest and thanked her for giving birth to me. From that day, I became a living and breathing ground for all sort of emotions, a ground that makes loving so easy. Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and to all women out there!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unrelated comment: I am new to your blog, and thus probably missed this info somewhere else on your blog. But I am curious to know what brought my Haitian sis to UAE, how long ago and where she was living before moving to UAE?

Hugues
Tampa, Florida

Pascale FD said...

Hi Hugues,

Thanks for visiting my blog. My husband works for a company that has branches in other countries: UAE, India, Jamaica....

Send me an email, I'll tell you more: fapy01@yahoo.com

Pascale

Francis Holland said...

Happy Mother's Day to you, too.

As my relationship to my two step-daughters evolves, I think they'll be telling me "Happy Room Mates Day" anytime now. Roommates try to be friendly and, if they can't or don't want to, they just withdraw into their own rooms and lives, right?

If roommates can collaborate on things like getting and making food, and doing the laundry then that's considered a successful household, right?

Well that's what I and my teenage step-daughters are doing. I'm not telling them what to do (except observe the boundaries they expect me to observe with respect to them). And since my wife had been telling me she was tired of hearing "negativity" about the girls from me, I have stopped observing their behavior (like whether they go to school or not).

If my wife asks me if they went to school, I remind her that she specifically insisted that I stop rounding up negative information about her daughters, so I have no idea whether they went to school or not.

I think she's realizing that absolving me of all responsibility for their rearing may have been somewhat of a mistake. But, told me to stop complaining or leave, and I've realized that complaining wasn't that much fun anyway, especially when I was doing it to "help" my wife and step-daughters, rather than to make my own life better.

In my family of origin, every one of us kids went to college, and three of us graduated. I this house, neither of the two college-aged young people are in college. But, hey! It's a lot easier to find funding to go to college in the US than it is here in Brazil.

As I release my expectations for how other people will live their lives, my own life becomes more pacific and pleasurable.

I've finally realized that my relationship with my step-daughters was like me sticking my head out of the window of a bus while driving through a tree-filled, overgrown forest. Now that I have my head inside the window of the bus, things are going much better.

My younger step daughter went into her room with a boy older than her and then told him over and over again to shut the door. I was the only other person in the house, so she obviously wanted privacy from me. The boy had more sense than my daughter does, because he didn't shut the door. He knows that would be disrespectful of the girl's parents and inherently suspect, particularly on his first visit to our house.

However, since my wife has told me she doesn't want to hear any more negativity about her daughters, I did not tell her that her fifteen year-old daughter wants to be alone, with the door closed, in a bedroom with a boy perhaps five years older. It's none of my business and I feel relieved not to have to react and respond to everything I see as a potential disaster.

I've realized that my wife and step-daughters have a God and he is NOT me.

Frankly, I'll tell the brothers out there that if you're going to go through as much B.S. as a adolescent will put you through, you might as well feel the wonders of having a child that is biologically yours as well.

Otherwise, it's like nurturing a fruit tree that's on your neighbor's land.

Pascale, thanks for visiting my blog and commenting on my story about my fiancee.

I just need to thank God that most of the women I've wanted to marry were people who didn't want to marry me! All the trouble starts when you propose to get married and they accept. If they don't accept, you can feel like you ducked and missed a stray bullet that was heading in your direction.

And it's not because they're women. It's because any two people who've know each other for a year and promise to be partners for fifty additional years are people skating on thin ice. Not all thin ice cracks, but some of it does and the water is VERY cold.

Pascale FD said...

Mr. Holland!

Thanks for your wishes. It's been ages since I updated my blog. I hope everything is fine for you in Brasil with your wife and stepdaughters. I'm not sure whether in Brasil Mother's Day is the last Sunday of May, but please say Happy Mother's Day to your wife for me.