I tried to fake it as I ate strawberries and drank iced tea and the children ran into each other, but I found reasons not to go back.
After a time, I realized that I had to grow up, to try to face what Garrison Keillor calls the “terrible question”: “If people knew the truth about us — if they saw where we live when it’s not cleaned up — would they still like us?” And I thought: ‘Aha — another gift of motherhood — to face that ‘terrible’ question.”

Keillor says he’s never resolved that question, and much of my life has been avoiding that same question. Now, I realized, I couldn’t avoid it much longer.

That mother’s group in the church basement had helped me face a truth: Friendship happens best when we come as we are. So now, when people visit and my house looks like a freeze frame of my life over the past two weeks — the clothes worn, meals eaten, bills not paid — well, so be it.

Or sometimes, after a sleepless night, when dark thoughts congregate like dew on a bud, I no longer effectively pretend otherwise. Like the night I spent crying in the bathtub because the temperature was 100 degrees in Chicago, we didn’t have air-conditioning, and I was one night-time feeding away from a meltdown.

An old friend called later that day. I whispered to her, like a confession: “I was terrible this morning.” And she said, “It’s part of being a mother.” We laughed, and grace shimmered, just a bit, in the summer heat.

These moments are helping me to see how immensely fallible I am and we all are, and how much we need to be restored through God's inestimable grace, which we often find through our friends — pieces of mosaic that make a good-enough picture of my life.

My vows to my son at his baptism, written by my friend, a minister, somehow capture my own wish for myself as a mom. They are taped to my refrigerator. I speak a little prayer every time I face the disorganized, over-ripe, and confusing mess inside.

My next-door neighbor passes along trucks and sneakers to my son and sits with me in the summer afternoons. I have little in common with her, aside from our two boys, and I think that just may be enough.
The woman down the block shares my child-rearing views, and I just couldn’t hold her at arm’s length, even though that’s what I like to do. We learned to trust each other at warp speed — she had a difficult second pregnancy to go through. My mother was sick.

Then there’s my old friend Lucia, whose own son I met when he was a day old, 18 years ago. One early spring day in Chicago — the day before my son’s second birthday — Lucia met us at a nature center on Chicago’s north side.

In her hand she had a backpack filled with beach toys. “I remember another little boy who likes backpacks,” she said as she handed the pack to my son. He put it on his back and refused to take it off, even though it nearly pulled him backwards. “By myself,” he said, as he tacked away through the wind. And I thought, as Lucia and I followed close behind, “Well, not really.”

As we walked around the nature center’s lagoon, the small boy and backpack veering like a sailboat, my friend took out her camera and said to my son, “Here is a picture of you on the last day you are one,” And I thought, she is giving me what I cannot always give myself: permission to be the mother I’d like to be, the freedom to love and give without fear of reprisal.



Clare La Plante is the author of Heaven Help Us: The Worrier's Guide to the Patron Saints (Dell 1999), Dear Saint Anne, Send Me a Man, and Other Time-tested Prayers for Love (Universe Publishing, 2002), and Chicago's 50 Best Places to Take Children (Universe Publishing, 2004). She lives with her husband and son in a Chicago suburb.

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