When daughters become mothers

Of all the astonishments of motherhood, watching my own daughters become mothers tops the list.
Of all the rewards I could have asked in this life, this is the sweetest.
My daughters are better at motherhood than I ever was. And that’s not just false modesty, believe me. They were better prepared.
They were not just smarter; they were wiser, too. And they were surely more ready to accept all the colossal challenges than I was when I became a mother at 21.
These same daughters who once drove me crazy, who left their rooms in post-hurricane condition, who failed to send thank-you notes to their relatives for decades, have found their calling. They are superb at mothering.
I have watched Jill, Amy and Nancy swell with pregnancies and become the most responsible, conscientious mothers-to-be, reading voraciously and knowing what every single week of development meant.
I spent those same months flying blind, more child than woman and surely not ready for the enormous job ahead.
I’m ashamed to admit that I ate carelessly, didn’t exercise and never even considered breast feeding back in the 1960s when having babies, for most women, was an automatic pilot experience.
“Don’t ask/don’t tell” might have been our motto before a new generation began to question and learn and re-shape not just their bodies, but the entire pregnancy experience.
But I was still a bit stunned when the daughters who never took their vitamins, seldom ate right and got no sleep for years on end during college were suddenly unrelentingly vigilant about their health the moment they became pregnant. I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing.
Natural childbirth? A given. Ditto for nursing.
Jill, Amy and Nancy were absolutely committed to doing everything right.
And then those babies came, and our daughters greeted them with the same awe, wonderment and surrender that women have for centuries. Determined as they were to do things perfectly, they were as overwhelmed as we all are when a tiny, helpless infant is placed in our arms – and in our perpetual care.
Jill, the oldest, became a mother first. The birth of Hannah turned our daughter, the same hard-bitten public defender who had visited the meanest and toughest in grim, dank prisons, into a marshmallow who wept when her baby daughter had her first bout with colic.
Her sisters were no less vulnerable.
“Hello, my daughter, hello my daughter,” Amy said through tears that wouldn’t stop coming when she greeted Emily one bitterly cold December day. Forget the corporate world, and high-powered meetings and visits to Manhattan art galleries. Amy’s new master was a tiny tyrant with an impressive set of lungs who led; Amy humbly followed – until her maternity leave was over.
Carly came next, and Amy continued that ultimate tightrope walk, the balancing of love and work/home and job.
And Nancy, the daughter who yearned so for a daughter of her own and instead has greeted three sons – Nancy has fallen madly, hopelessly in love with bruisers Sam, Jonah and Daniel.
In so many ways, each of our daughters has shown a new and unexpected side of herself in mothering. So in joyously welcoming our seven grandchildren, I have also re-met their mothers – our daughters.
Despite their predictable fears and anxieties, I have seen in them strength and courage that I never knew was there. I have seen stamina and commitment, self-sacrifice and incredible energy.
I never balanced motherhood and demanding careers as they are doing. I never lived so close to the edge that there seemed the ever-present danger of simply falling off into total and absolute exhaustion.
And I surely never juggled so many activities that it takes a master scheduler just to pull it off.
I’m not sure I tell my daughters often enough how enormously proud of them I am as mothers. I hope that my occasional, unsolicited advice doesn’t drown out the most important message: That they are wonderful, competent mothers.
Sometimes, when I see Jill calming her son or daughter’s latest tempest, or I watch Amy singing to Carly and Emily at bedtime, I think my heart will burst wide open.
When I watch Nancy hugging Sam, cheering Jonah on in the third-grade play or kissing little Danny’s freckled cheeks, I want to weep at the purity of it all.
My daughters are mothers – fine, loving, generous ones. Better ones than I could have imagined.
And what a sweet, sweet reward that is for any mother on this Mother’s Day.

-- Sally Friedman