One More Perspective

As far as most people are concerned, for a Mother of three to answer the question “What’s something you’ve done that you never thought you could?” with “To live my life for me,” sounds utterly selfish. I understand that reaction. I am five minutes out of the entrenched social programming that if a Mother, then motherhood is that woman’s whole life and worth. I am also still inventorying all the ways that belief harmed my children and me.

First, when we buy into equating the worth of a woman by her report card as a Mother, we erase her personhood, absolve the other parent of liability, and rob the children of agency. Let me count the ways.

The maternal report card is an entrenched cultural con job designed to extract endless, unpaid emotional labor from women by assigning them 100 percent of the liability for a family’s outcome, while downright celebrating the other parent for minimum effort. The reason this social programming works so well is that it plugs straight into a quiet, tactical trick of the human brain: our brain protects us from grieving by invoking our shame instead. Grief requires us to sit in the flat helplessness of loss and accept that we cannot control other people, their choices, or the fractures in our family. Society exploits that vulnerability. By training a Mother to feel personal shame for every fracture in the home, the culture hands her a counterfeit sense of agency. It whispers a seductive lie: if everything wrong in this family is my failure, then I still have control. If I am the problem, I can work harder, sacrifice more, and engineer the solution.

When a woman buys into that illusion of control, she stops being a person with limits and becomes the household’s default shock absorber. Every struggle her children face and every fracture in the home goes straight onto her permanent record. To stave off a failing grade, she over-functions. She steps into spaces she does not need to occupy, absorbs blame that isn’t hers, and white-knuckles her way through impossible dynamics, upholding her childhood survival mechanism along the way, as if it’s a matter of life and death. She subconsciously believes the adaptations that ensured her survival are a must for her own children too, despite being on a different continent in a different decade under a different of government and economics.

Worse, by taking 100 percent of the responsibility to maintain the illusion that she can fix it all, she accidentally teaches everyone else in the room that they have zero liability for the outcome. Other adults get a free pass to under-function or rewrite history, while the children are quietly stripped of their own agency, treated not as autonomous human beings accountable for their own relationships, but as living extensions of their Mother’s pass-fail grade. 

The year 2020 leaves many shuddering, but I would return to that all-around horrific year in a heartbeat, if I could. That may have been the year I was at my most fractured as an adult, when my survival programming was at its peak since I was a small child.

By 2020, I already knew in my bones that yet another marriage I was in was not going to work. Facing that truth would have required grieving the end of the relationship right as the world was shutting down and my twins were graduating from high school. Instead of letting myself grieve what was already over, my childhood survival programming kicked into overdrive. I was too invested, and far too panicked about the state of my family I had fought to create, to implode it once more. I stayed in a marriage that was costing me my dignity because I believed that holding the structure together, at any cost to myself, was what a good Mother did.

At the same time, the pop-psychology boom was ramping up in the broader culture, handing a generation of young adults a simplified vocabulary of blame that reduced complex, multi-generational family histories into neat labels of who was toxic and who was a victim.
Into that exact moment stepped my Mother.

My Mother had just lost the allegiance of my older son, who had spent years in her good graces by understanding the value of compliance with her narrative. With a vacancy in her orbit, my graduating daughter slid and clicked right into that slot.
There is a painful irony in watching that second alliance form. This is the same Grandmother I had cut off in the mid-2000s to protect my daughter when she was a small, fierce, brilliant child and my Mother repeatedly called her “crazy.” Back then, I knew how to draw a line. Yet years later, ashamed of my multiple marriages and wanting my children to have an extended family, I relented. For over a decade, I protected my Mother’s history. I shielded my children from the painful realities of my own childhood and the six years my Mother left me behind in Communist Hungary.  I believed that keeping the peace and carrying the generational weight in silence was my job as my own children’s Mother.

For a long time after 2020, my shame tried to convince me that even that was my failure: that if I had just explained our family history differently, or worked harder, understood my own behaviors better, or managed the invisible alliances forming around my children, I could have prevented the fallout.

That is the trap of the maternal report card. Whether you speak up or stay silent, whether you fund twenty-two years of private school or come up short, the game is rigged so that the Mother is always on trial.

When I say I would go back to 2020 in a heartbeat, it is no longer because I think I could have engineered different choices for my Mother, my former spouses, or my children. Their choices belong to them. I would go back in a heartbeat to rescue myself from the autopilot of thinking I had to hold the sky up. I would go back to trade the counterfeit control of shame for the clean honesty of grief: to grieve the marriage that was over and leave it, to stop protecting people from the truth of my and their own histories, and to drop my end of a rope that was tearing my hands apart.

I cannot go back to 2020, of course. What I can do today is step off the witness stand and tear up the report card. Once you let yourself grieve what you never had the power to control, shame loses its job.

Today, that looks like a quiet, daily practice. Every day I take time to identify my emotions and allow myself to feel them, instead of running roughshod over them. I practice taking full responsibility for my own feelings, and stopping myself from taking responsibility for anyone else’s. I spend a lot of time alone, having withdrawn my energy from relationships in which I was managing feelings for two.

Living my life for me is not a betrayal of motherhood. It is not an absolution from how my children experienced me. It is simply the moment I stop over-functioning to earn a passing grade, hand other adults back their own liability and their own agency, and finally claim the life that belongs to me.