What I learned this summer

Every Summer I have an internal struggle between the mom that I want to be and the one that I really am. I start every long vacation with the certainty that there is where I want to be, only to end it up feeling that I want to run far away. It is like a long lasting fight between wanting to go on adventures with my children, but wanting them to be short. Between loving to cook for them, but not really always or too often and so on. This Summer started the same, and yet it ended like an entirely different one.

2018 was the summer of love

Summer 2018 started with the news that hundreds of mother had been separated from their kids at the Mexico-USA border. As an immigrant mother myself, I felt instantly identified with the wish to provide a better future for your children. That was the reason I came to the US, and I imagine that was the reason those moms came too. Imagining the pain and trauma of been removed of your role as protecting mother was heartbreaking

By mid-summer, a long time friend announced that she decided to donate one of her kidneys to her 11-year-old son that was in need. Her little one was born with renal failure and even though we all knew that eventually, he will need a transplant it took me by surprise to know that she was going to be the donor. What better proof of the unconditional love as a mother, that she was willing to give him life as many times as it is necessary.

Three weeks before the end of the summer, my aunt calls me to tell me that one of her friends had a massive stroke. At only 48, she went to bed one night and never woke up.  No warning, no good-bye. She left behind a 15-year-old girl that will have to live the rest of her life pulling out of her memories the relationship with her mother. That call was devastating…it was like a heart earthquake…

What if I die today? Would I be ready to go?

My first thought was: Of course not! I have so many things to teach and live with my kids! And at the same time there I was,  wasting the summer feeling their vacation was too long or that I needed time apart from them. I was receiving messages reminding me how important it is to be a mother but I was too deaf to hear them. 

After that revelation, I just could do one thing: To relax and let it go! Because when we are in a fight within ourselves, the worst thing we can do is to hold tight. In holding tight, it is like we are trying to asphyxiate the problem, but the problem is inside us, so we ended up asphyxiating ourselves. When you relax everything drops into the ground, and the wind picks up what is worth flying, which in this case is that I love my children and I love to be their mother...

In the end, I had my first great vacation.

Macy