First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Illustration by Alex Siklos
The worst thing my sons ever said to me was while hiking during the height of COVID. After endless hours of screen time we’d head north of the city to walk in the forest in the still-frozen spring. As we came to a wooden bridge my two sons, then 12 and 14, agreed that I was neither warm nor fuzzy.
“What,” I said, “does that mean?”
“Look mom, you’re a great person and we love you, but no one would describe you as warm or fuzzy,” one of my sons declared cheerfully.
I felt cut to my soul.
While warm or fuzzy wouldn’t be in my top five personality traits, “mother” would be, and I thought of myself as a warm and fuzzy mom. I’d spent hours cuddled up with my children with a good book or a game. I’d slept with them for years. I would have smothered them with kisses daily if they still let me.
And now, there I was, callously written off.
“So who is warm and fuzzy?” I asked.
The kids conferred for a moment and then agreed, Marcy, my older sister, was a warm and fuzzy person.
This complicated matters. My beloved sister Marcy and I were close, but had different parenting beliefs. When my children were young my husband and I enforced bedtimes, limited candy to special occasions and used TV for when we needed to nap. My sister thought these limits excessive, but I didn’t care. My kids were better able to regulate their behaviour when they were well-rested and ate reasonably healthy meals.
Besides, there was no keeping up with my sister. If we took the kids out for the afternoon and I brought fruit, she had Fruit Roll-Ups. If I had granola bars with chocolate chips, Marcy would have brownies. I stopped trying to compete the day she brought gummy bears that squirted fake blood from their translucent bellies.
If giving kids all the sugar they wanted, endless screen time and no bedtime was Warm and Fuzzy Mom, then I was okay to be Rules Mom. Besides, my kids were now teens learning to regulate their own bedtimes and snacks. Any attempt at screen regulation had completely fallen apart during COVID.
I tried to put warm and fuzzy aside. But it came up again.
When we passed the same bridge months later the kids named it Not Warm and Fuzzy Point.
“Remember how upset mom was?” they laughed.
I pretended not to care, but I was worried my children had seen my true, self-centred self. Yes, I was a mom and I loved being one, but I also loved being a writer. I had thought I was doing a good job balancing parenting, writing and my teaching job, but this required an enormous amount of organization. Like so many moms, I spent a lot of my not-free time scheduling soccer practices and music lessons and driving to birthday parties.
As I sat on my living room couch during COVID trying to teach my children about classical composers (limited success), meditation (a total failure), and some basic English spelling (marginal progress) I wondered whether I’d missed the parenting forest for the trees.
I imagined my children writing on my gravestone, She was efficient, or worse, She got a lot of errands done.
In the years since COVID, I’ve taken my husband’s advice that using teenage boys as the soothsayers of parenting success is probably not a good choice. I’ve also thought about the kind of mother I’d like to be. I realized that almost none of the women I admire are what my children would call warm and fuzzy. They are loving mothers, but they are also accomplished and organized women who value their careers as well as their families. My friend Erin is an accountant who also plays cello, runs five kilometres regularly and makes a mean Jello shot. My own mother, a successful realtor and fashionista working into her late 70s, is also not the cuddly type.
While my children might have valued a warm and fuzzy mom when they were younger, our relationship is changing. They don’t need me to read them stories or bandage booboos. They need essays proofread (always late at night), endless chauffeuring and enormous meals, preferably with lots of meat. They want to discuss which communist leader had the best hair (my older son) and which flowers to buy a girlfriend on Valentine’s (my younger son).
Last Mother’s Day, my sons, still occasionally callous and deeply invested in fart jokes, were also maturing enough to know the things I needed to hear. My older son wrote to me, “Cards are a social construct but I’ll make you one anyways because I love you.” My younger son drew me a card with three women on a podium. The title above them read, World’s Best Mommy – Warm and Fuzzy! The top podium position was labelled “you,” and the number two position said, “your sister.” Third place he labelled, “someone else.”
I keep the cards on my desk where I see them every day. Each time I look at them, I get a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Leanne Lieberman lives in Kingston.