Ah, it’s Mother’s Day. The day when all of us hard working, perpetually stressed out moms deserve a little TLC. My Mother’s Day usually starts with a delectable array of fresh berries, an egg white omelet, pink grapefruit slices and a specially prepared cappuccino that my 13- and 10-year-old sons, Levi and Eli, have managed to whip together over several hours, much arguing and complete kitchen chaos. Of course they’ll “clean up” the mess their thoughtful gesture has created; unfortunately it won’t be anywhere near my standards, and I’ll end up spending an hour and a half scrubbing dried egg white off the burners and scraping caked-on grapefruit pulp off the granite countertops.
What is wrong with me? Why is my focus always on the negative? Hello? They made me breakfast. They still want to show me how much I mean to them. What faulty maternal gene makes me so worried about the mess in the kitchen that I can’t even enjoy the overcooked omelet and coffee?
For years I’ve attributed this type of thinking to the “Nudelman negativity.”That’s the hereditary “glass is half empty” mentality inherited from my mom’s side. We joke about it a lot. But the truth is, that kind of thought process is hard to erase. It’s like it’s programmed into one’s DNA, and without some seriously heavy cognitive attention it simply doesn’t go away.
My therapist likes to work in metaphors that are meaningful specifically to the patient she is seeing. For me, a lot of cinematic and stage metaphors come into our therapy sessions. “Where do you want to shine the spotlight in this story?” she might ask. Or “Where is the camera lens going to focus in this situation?”
I find it slightly irritating when something as simple as this actually works to improve my attitude and make my life better. But it’s about as effective a technique as I’ve ever tried.
When I keep the spotlight on the thoughtfulness of my boys’ genuine desire to show me they love and appreciate me, the mess in the kitchen seems a lot less troublesome. When I abandon my petty cleanliness concerns, I can enjoy the few remaining delights of my kids’ preadolescent years. No doubt I will soon be inundated with boys who think everything I do is idiotic, trivial and completely out of step with what’s important to them. This breakfast-in-bed moment, with two nearly grown boys, a loving husband, food trays, plates of fruit, coffee mugs and two large dogs all crammed into the bed, is one of the special moments of life that may not stick with me as time goes on. And time always goes on.
That’s the sad part. In some ways I want to hold onto this moment so tightly because I’m all too aware of how fleeting it really is. I still remember my first Mother’s Day. My husband stayed up all night filling the entire house with helium balloons and Happy Mother’s Day signs. Of course after I cried with joy at the sight and the love that went into creating it, I panicked that our 8-month-old baby might mouth one of the balloons and end up choking himself to death. There it was again, the Nudelman negativity. It just doesn’t quit. After I made him pop every last balloon and rid the house of all remaining latex scraps, I felt a lot safer – and a lot less special.
On the bright side, maybe that’s what being a mother is all about. It’s so easy to fault ourselves for everything. But maybe being the harbinger of all potential accidents and injuries is just what we’re destined to be. After all, how do you keep your kids safe, your family functional and your house in some kind of order if you aren’t always thinking three steps ahead and worrying about every tangential negative outcome. Maybe it’s my job to be a maternal troubleshooter. Without my sniffing out each and every potential pitfall in life, maybe we would fall prey to any number of unexpected and unforeseen disasters.
Perhaps my hard-wired Nudelman negativity is really an innate, self-protective, “survival of the fittest” gene that enables my children to live safely, keeps my spouse loyal and protected, and maintains my house in a somewhat orderly manner that contributes to a sense of harmony within the family. Yup, that’s the story I’m shining my spotlight upon. You see it differently, write your own story.
Debra Rich Gettleman is a mother and blogger based in the Phoenix area. for more of her work, visit unmotherlyinsights.com.
