There are a lot of stories about being a mother I can tell. My son is 23 years old and I have learned a lot about what to do and not to do. I have been incredibly fortunate to have pop culture really help me to be a better a parent. I know, that is a weird ass statement but it is true. I love my family very much but I went into motherhood wanting to be the exact opposite of my parents on a lot of fronts. And there are still aspects of my relationship with my family that still make me cringe and think “I must never do that to my son”.

It’s not like I look at my life and think, oh, it was horrible. Far from it. There are aspects of my life my parents had no control over. Being sick so much was just as much of a burden on them as it was for me. It was my body that had the surgeries but to be honest, the idea of seeing my son in a hospital bed the way my parents had to see me? I don’t know where they got the strength.

We were poor, especially when I was very little. Times were there was just broccoli with an American cheese slice on top was dinner. But the rest of my family would never of let us starve, that is a given. There were also the mental aspects as well. I wasn’t just a daughter I was a best friend. And there were things put on me as a child that probably shouldn’t have been. When my stepdad came into my life at 7 I had to approve right away. When he proposed, I was part of the decision. At one point he told me I had to stop trying to take care of my mom, because that was his job now, and I needed to be a kid. I was 8. If Joe hadn’t of been a functioning addict with his own childhood trauma he never fully managed to work through, the rest of my childhood probably would have gotten much better. Like you’re not my real dad to I love you dad Disney channel movie better. But though I loved my dad, I also can acknowledge the other issues that came that I to this day still have scars, so literal, from.

My parents were/are not bad people. I sincerely do not know of a single person who has perfect parents. And mine were so young. My mom is 19 years older than me. She was still a child herself. She was married, had a child, moved three times (Air Force brat here), divorced and had a child who almost died once and had one surgery already by the age my son is now. I do not fault her for a single thing. How she didn’t end up completely insane is beyond me. But it did leave me with a lot of - I’m not doing that.

My son was a surprise. I didn’t think I could have kids. He is completely aware of this. Primarily because I call him my miracle baby. Not because I got surprise preggers. Yes, that from a timing perspective sucked. The pregnancy was horrible, the delivery weird, sure. But my kidneys are not normal. I technically have kidney disease due to all the damage I sustained due to bad treatment when I was a baby on the Air Force base (that whole almost died part) and a tumor that was ignored by a shit doctor who was too busy shaming my single parent mom for working to actually notice a 4 year had a large bulge in her stomach that was rock hard. It grew so large that it did damage to my ureters that in turn messed m\up my kidneys even more until surgeries 2 and 3 went in to fix them. It’s obvious why I work trying to fix the healthcare system to hold folks to outcomes, doesn’t it?

No, the miracle is that he didn’t do more damage. See, yes, I have one ovary. Yes, there was a massive amount of scar tissue that wrapped everything and still liked to be a dick and grow. But those were to prevent from getting pregnant. No, the real fear came from pregnancy causing damage because as much as we like to pretend in this country and pregnancy is this beautiful pleasant thing, there is a reason so many women have died of it throughout history. That shit is HARD on your body. Massively. I won’t go into details but if you want to talk about the fear aspect of what it could do go watch Steel Magnolias.

But God love him, nothing got worse. In fact, the ovarian cysts, aside from a flair up on occasion stopped after him. He made things better for me. But my doctors were not inclined to want me to take that chance again. To put bluntly, orphan my son or at least need a kidney transplant, so the one tube got tied.

I have always wanted a ton of kids. I love children. I wanted kids when I was little and that has never lessened. But my body, it has different plans for me. And it took me a while to accept it.

And as I got older I realized maybe that was for the best anyway. I have not always been the best parent. I have made a lot of mistakes. Like holy shit a lot. But having only one has allowed me to grow and learn from those mistakes because I have the time and energy to learn with the one. And that in turn has made me a much better person, I think. I have screwed up on a lot of things. But I have also excelled in others. And being able to do so influences so much of my other life, especially my work.

I will be doing more of these and going into my mistakes. This is more of an explanation of how it started, some of the main drivers of my initial viewpoints of parenting and why it has evolved.

Letting some of this out is just plain therapeutic. Some is really just trying to better understand how I got there. But all of it comes from a place of love. I love my parents. I love my son. I love being a mother. But damn is it hard. Damn do you feel like a failure a lot. The regrets are countless. And all you really want is that your child grow up to be a self-sufficient adult who has a life they want to live. Which in today’s day, is incredibly hard. My God how much has changed since I was a kid. So this will be more of a true figure it out as I write kind of posts.

I wonder how many parents have made the same mistakes I have made or feel the way I feel.