“As is the mother, so is the daughter.” What a ridiculous concept! Of course, I disagreed. “I have nothing in common with my mother,” I repeated over and over again. My mother and I, we repel. As a kid, growing up, I could not stand my mother. She was really tough. She always seemed to be upset about something I did. At least once a week, there was some catastrophic, world-endangering mistake I made that ignited her rage. When I was facing my mother’s wrath, it was like being in an inferno. I usually started crying, but my mother does not like people crying. I would try to suppress the tears, and as a consequence, I would end up with terrible hiccups. I grew up to be a pretty tough girl, not to mention a rebellious one. Any chance I got, I would put up a fight with my mother. If she yelled at me, I would yell back as loud. However, I am proud to say that it was my mother who got me where I am today, and she played big role in making me who I am today. In the last three years, our relationship has changed due to three significant things: how I started to become more mature in my perceptions, how I realized that we are similar in a lot of ways, and how I began to understand her as a person as I spent more time with her. I got some first-hand experiences on Newton’s third law of motion, that to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I made a few big mistakes and I ended up with a handful of problems. I have tasted a bit of what life is outside of my family, and through all that, I grew up. I accepted the fact that my mother never got mad at me if I wasn’t in trouble. I was a pretty naughty girl, and I really needed my mom to discipline me. I remember one time we went to a church retreat. I was so eager to swim that I changed into my swimming suit and jumped into the pool, alone. The adults and all of my friends were up having service, and I was down there playing in the pool. My omniscient mother realized that I was not in the service. She looked out the window and saw me playing by myself in the pool. I was in big trouble. She marched down and dragged me out of the pool and spanked me a few times. Up until now, I have never forgotten that day. I used to think, “Wow! My mom was really mad that day.” Now it suddenly clicks. My mom had a reason to be mad that day. It was dangerous, what I did. I could have had cramps or accidents swimming without supervision. It took me some major growing up before I realized that my mother was really disciplining me. Solomon says, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him” (Proverbs 13.24, NIV). My mother was showing her love when she disciplined me. I remember her always saying, “I would rather have you lose one of your legs and go to heaven than have you healthy and fit but end up in hell.” I have changed drastically. Manning described a similar situation by saying, “I am no longer a rebel in the household, wanting to stand up against the master with clenched fists and tensing jaws (Manning 146). Now, I am really grateful that my mother disciplined me the way she did.
After I was old enough to understand why my mother did what she did, I began to notice some similarities between us. We love to cook and eat food. We love all kinds of food that contains chocolate, cheese or milk. Doing the things we love best together “has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure” (Staples 207). We react similarly towards certain circumstances. For example, how we both react to my father. My father is a great man of God, but sometimes he is pretty close-fisted. My mother and I both hate that. She is an ambitious person. I am too. That is why she understands me. She knows how I feel when someone in the church scrutinizes what I do. She understood when my best friend left for Canada. She understands when I get into unresolved fights with my father. Now I know what it was that made my mother and me fight a lot. We were made of the same material. I am tough, and she is tough.
I have spent more time with my mother in the last two years than I have in my whole entire life, probably excluding my toddler years. My mother works as a teacher in my school, and my last two years of high school, she drove me to school. I spent a lot of time with her in the car, just chatting. All those rides to and from school opened my eyes to who my mother is. I learned about her struggles, her hopes, her fears, he prayers, and her life through those car rides. My mother is a small woman with hopes, dreams, and love much bigger than herself. She was the one who wanted me to go to college in the United States. My mother could not bear to see me go, it was “Mother’s greatest fear” (Cofer 165). It was she who prayed day and night for me, and it was her love that brought me here. She has her weaknesses, but still, she is a strong woman.
Lately, I have fallen in love with Mark Harris’ song, “Find Your Wings.” Every time I hear that song, I always think of my mother. I look back and see how I have grown, how I have come to understand my mother, and how I’ve come to realize her love in my life. Like the lyrics to that song, it was her love that “gave me roots and helps me find my wings.”
