Mind The Gap: With Bridget

Let’s Discuss Parenting

I’ve never been a good student, especially in high school—where I spent most of my day worrying about whatever fresh hell was brewing back home—and frankly I’m surprised that at some point I didn’t have to repeat a grade, because I just didn’t see the point in doing homework. Ever. I’m smart. I am. And that’s not me being full of myself and annoying, but I am smart, and all my teachers knew that I was.

So yes, I spent pretty much every day of school antsy to get home to spend some time with my mom. She just got me in a way that I don’t think anyone ever would. She saw the stress that I went through at school, and how it morphed into insomnia by the time that I was 13. When the cracks were really showing and I was at the point of a breakdown, she’d let me stay home from school and just decompress. I’d go with her into the city for one of her doctor’s appointments, or a chemo treatment and skip a day of school in the process. By the time I graduated, my attendance record was pretty pathetic, but I don’t regret how much school I missed.

A lot of people probably think that my mom wasn’t a great parent in those moments where she’d just look at me wearily getting ready to get on the bus and just declare that we were going to the mall, but those moments were probably some of the best days that I had throughout middle and high school. I think that being a good parent means really understanding your child, figuring out how they operate, and making the tough decision between what’s good for their permanent record and what will make them a happier person in the end. Jill knew that I just couldn’t handle the stress of school and she was practically my partner in crime when it came to skipping school.

She was so accepting of whoever I was trying to be at the moment, she loved me so unconditionally. While I saw my friends arguing with their parents, and facing critical judgment when they went home, I had a mom who I literally told everything. I heard horror stories about mothers who put their kids on diets when they started to gain a little weight. When I gained my freshman 15, and cried the whole way home on Christmas break because literally none of my cloths fit me anymore, my mom just told me that, “Shit happens.” And then we went to the mall.

My mom taught me that while it’s difficult to accept yourself for who you are, it’s better than fighting against yourself. Gaining weight sucks, and when I felt like a complete fat-ass, my mom told me that I was pretty, and that everyone can find fault in their body. She encouraged me to buy clothes that fit my body, and weren’t just the size that I wanted so badly to be, and yet when I lost weight just by being healthier, she’d gleefully tell me that this meant we’d just have to go shopping.

None of you really knew my mom. I keep trying to explain what an amazing person she was, but I don’t think I will ever be able to put into words what she did for me. She’s the reason that I haven’t completely self-destructed since her death. She turned me into a strong person who could make it through the devastation of losing a parent at such a young age.

I know she had more to teach me about life, way more than she had time for. But I managed to squeeze two decades out of a person who wasn’t supposed to last longer than two years after her diagnosis.

I’m a lucky person to have had her for as long as I did, because she wasn’t a perfect mother, but she was the best mom that I ever had. I really don’t have a hope of finding a person on this planet who can replicate what she did for me. But I do see aspects of my mother in the people around me. There’s the friends who truly accept me for who I am, and understand when I just need a break from all the work—they’re the ones that I text whenever I feel like a complete failure, and they never let me down. There’s the family who still look at me with concern about the person that I’m growing in to, they’ll be there when I start a family of my own. The women I work with, who tell me how much I remind them of my mom, who are my guardians against all the bullshit people try to pull on me at work, and who are so excited about all the things I do up at school.

I have these people, but I miss the one who wielded all these powers so easily by herself.

I think that by the time that I’m a parent, I might miss her even more than I do right now, but the best thing I can take out of this situation is raising my children like my mom raised me. I know I was difficult at times, and we didn’t get along at points, but she was just always there for me when I came around. I want to be that beacon of support for my kids. I want them to feel for me what I feel about my mom.

I’ve never really known anyone who’s said that they would raise their children the exact same way that they were raised. There’s an amendment, “When I have kids, I’ll—” accompanied by a story about some issue they had with their parents, which every kid has with their mom and dad. I want to raise my kids the exact same way that I grew up, but without the illness.

So in the future, when it comes down to my son or daughter coming to me with that look in their eye before school, I don’t think it’ll be that difficult for me to say, “Let’s go shopping and talk about this,” to them. I hope they appreciate that statement as much as I did.

And yeah, I will probably mess something up along the way, but I also hope that I’m around to teach them the things I had to learn on my own after my mom died.