Every Mother’s Day we honor moms with cards filled with warm sentiments extolling our many wonderful and loving qualities that make us sound positively divine. We rarely acknowledge the fact that mothering isn’t always pretty.
One of the unforgettable images from the Baltimore riots will forever be of the mom moment when Toya Graham chased her 16-year-old son out of the brick-throwing mob, whacked him alongside the head and gave him what for all the way across the street.
It may not be my style or your style, but she was in mom-mode doing what needed to be done.
My own mother was legendary when it came to getting the job done. She was in the hospital once and caught wind that my brother, then underage, was in possession of some alcohol. From her hospital bed, the woman was able to issue a threat of such substance that he relinquished the booze.
A friend around the corner once intercepted some teenage communication leading her to suspect that her daughter was at a movie she’d been told she could not see. My friend got in her car, marched into the darkened theater where the movie had already started, found her daughter and marched her out.
The Baltimore mom who hauled her son out by the scruff of the neck is being heralded as heroic, with some suggesting she be named Mother of the Year. She did a good thing, but what she did should be commonplace and ordinary, not jaw-dropping and extraordinary. You see your kid headed in the wrong direction; you call the kid up short. It’s called parenting.
When you’re raising kids (as opposed to letting them raise themselves), every moment counts. Teachable moments count double and triple. The teachable moments are often hard, frustrating for both the parent and the child. But you hang with it; you don’t quit. Anybody can love a kid from the heart, with the soft and sappy, indulgent love, but loving from the gut means you’re willing to enter the fray, you determine not to give up and not to let the kid slide. You may not win, but you give it your best shot.
The thing with parenting is that you get one chance. There are no do-overs. You get roughly 18 years to set the ship on course.
The young man whose mother stood him down in Baltimore said that when he saw his mother, his first instinct was to run. But he knew that running would only make it worse. Smart kid.
You could see anger and embarrassment on his face, and then there was a moment when he winced and displayed what appeared to be a twinge of regret. He knew he was busted because he knew his mom has standards, and at that moment he was on the wrong side of them.
When a kid knows that you love him and want the best for him, you can get in the kid’s face. It is that moment, when a kid finally understands that you’re doing what you’re doing because you’ve got his back, that you’ve also got his heart.
Lori Borgman is a columnist, author and speaker.
Email her at loriloriborgman.com.
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