Upon discovering I was pregnant last June, my instantaneous reaction was to exclaim to my husband, “I don’t know how to be anybody’s mom!” My husband loves to tell that story, and when he repeats it to our daughter at some future date, I hope she won’t hate me for it. However, since that time, both before and after our daughter arrived, I’ve continued to struggle with that question. I’ve read all of the parenting magazines, several parenting books and had constant conversations with my friends, family and pediatrician to figure out how best to mother my child.
Then, my sister sent me a beautiful gift for my first Mother’s Day. It’s a book called Mother Nurture: Life Lessons from the Mothers of America’s Best and Brightest. It provides insight into how the mothers of successful people created such incredible human beings. After reading the entry by Nancy Golden, mother of famous interior designer Nate Berkus, my burning question was finally answered in the simplest way. As you may know, Nate’s boyfriend, Fernando, was swept away from their hotel room in Thailand and killed during the tsunami. Here’s the excerpt from the book that provided the “Ah-ha!” moment I needed.
“I have never felt more useless as a mother,” Nancy recalls about the devastating period. “Watching your child suffer and not being able to put a Band-Aid on the wound is true heartache.” But it was some formative advice during that period of intense loss that Nancy says made an indelible impression on how she sees her role as a mother today. “A therapist told me that when you breathe, you breathe oxygen, but you don’t think about it, you just do it. ‘You’re Nate’s oxygen’, he told me. ‘You don’t need to do anything more than be there. It’s not anything you say. It’s just your presence that supports and helps him.’”
What a simple yet brilliant statement. Although I’m sure I’ll never meet Nancy, I can’t thank her enough for finally instilling in me the confidence to be a mother, simply by being there for my daughter.