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“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.” ~ Pema Chödrön
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My mom wasn’t the tidiest housekeeper.

Her house was always clean, but with five kids, she just couldn’t keep up. She waited until we were in bed, usually around 7:30 p.m. (really, Mom?), to gather the strewn Tinker toys, plastic army men, baby doll clothes, pink-flecked chalk boards, and aluminum roller skates that peppered the tired-blue carpet.

She grew up with a broken mother who preferred smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee at her sister’s house to baking cookies for her returning school children on late afternoons. Though it would soon be the 1950s, she was no June Cleaver. She didn’t cook. She didn’t even come home when her kids were home. Better to let them figure things out on their own.

So my mother, figuring things out at four years old on the concrete steps leading to her family’s fourth floor Brooklyn apartment, did a 180-degree turn when it came to her kids. She was always home, maybe not with hot-baked chocolate chip cookies, but with her smile and sharp wit. My mom could crack a wicked-smart joke or mime some slapstick pose or facial expression.

But she was sad underneath.

I saw it. She would cry. I thought she was over-sentimental at the time, but when she told me what her therapist said one day when we were both long past toys and a chaotic, raucous, overcrowded ranch style home on Long Island, I cried, too. But much later.

She told her therapist about her mother’s neglect, the days sitting out front of the apartment waiting for her mother to return from wherever, nosey neighbors with suspicious glares asking where her mother was, and the nickel her mom would eventually give her to spend at the corner luncheonette for dinner (of course, she’d buy herself sweets). But she always punctuated the anecdotes with, “But I know my mother loved me.”

One day, her therapist responded, “Yes, but maybe not enough.”

It struck her, pierced her heart. It was an awakening that deeply hurt my mother. I watched her, paralyzed with the enormity of her pain and rejection. She cried bitterly, and I was helpless before my pillar, the one who greeted me every morning with hurried care and every evening with exhausted good nights.

Somehow, that therapy session relieved her of a burden. After a while, she didn’t need to make excuses for her mother. She could mother herself. A few decades later, when my own children were just beyond teenage-hood and my own therapy sessions long over, I would mother her, until the last exhausted good night and goodbye.

My own awakening would occur soon after her death, sitting down at the kitchen table with my 20-something daughters who were in therapy themselves. They had things to tell me, important messages, about how I never taught them to communicate, our household a bastion of stuffed feelings and non-communication and dysfunctional relationships.

Hurt, stunned, and defensive, I responded, “I did the best I could with what I had.”

And they scolded me for shutting them down, for gaslighting them. I couldn’t believe it.

Hadn’t I sacrificed my body, mind, and bed for them, practicing attachment parenting, child-led weaning, and family bed? Hadn’t I chosen the best Montessori schools, homeschooling when my older daughter could not keep all four legs of the school room chair on the ground to her teacher’s irritation, carting them to team sport practices 40 minutes away three to five times a week, giving up my weekends to travel to furnaced hells and arctic tundra up and down the coast for tournaments, college visits, parties, school events, and countless other acts of devotion? I did the best I could!

But I swallowed that lump in my throat, hard as granite, and I listened. They wanted me to hear them. It was hard for them, though they disguised it with anger. They loved me enough to tell me what injured them, even at the cost of hurting me.

And I was devastated, shredded to the bone.

I prided myself on being a good parent, always striving to do my best. The chaos I grew up in drove me to crave order and control. When my kids were little, I cleaned every inch of our house, fought against the disorder that children bring. Yet, I allowed them a big room to themselves to jump on Kool-Aid colored couches and pillows, empty the costume treasure chest on the playroom floor to play dress up, run videos on the television and sing too loudly to silly songs—and scream and fight among the neighborhood kids who seemed to always gather at our house.

I always had a plan, a schedule, a goal, and I thought I taught my daughters to be strong, active, independent, and, above all, compassionate to themselves and others. But they were looking for me—in my words, attention, and silence. They wanted to feel my beating heart again after they left my bosom as babies, circle back to the mystery that shaped their days.

They wanted less order, activity, and plans, and more of me, the real me, the authentic me who secretly wrote poetry, drifted in quiet reverie over steaming java before the household stirred awake, dreaming of Portugal, the Azores, remembering road trips, hitchhiking my way through towns and cities near and far, gazing up at a night sky in the mountains for the first time, sneaking out into the snowy night to the arms of my teenage lover, and secretly gathering my disunited selves—daughter, mother, wife, friend, coach, lawyer, teacher, writer, room mom, volunteer, reiki master, science-buff, reader, introvert, poet, cellist, child of the universe—fused in yoga, prayer, meditation, and tears.

I loved my children then as I do now—but not in all the ways they needed to be loved.

The arrow in my heart awakened me to an ancient memory. I remembered that we are all walking in the shadows of our perceptions, building monuments to images we believe in only to see them come crashing down at the words of a mother, child, spouse, friend, guide, and anyone else imparting wisdom. Live your most authentic life, keep your eyes and heart open, embrace abundance, and stem the fear of failing—bleed, scar, and learn from your wounds.

The day they confronted me with their heart-felt grievances, they did better than I did for my bereaved mother. Though I was quiet, I listened and begrudgingly uttered “I hear you,” as they spoke their hearts and quietly assured me through their anger and tears that we were okay.

We still are.

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