Mother is God in the eyes of the child….

I am nothing if not a horror movie addict. Oh not the kind that really gets into them and watches them like a cult follower. I’m the ridiculous kind that has to turn down the volume at times, watch with a friend and have all the lights on. Addicted because I like to run up the basement stairs for fear my ankles will be grabbed by the monster lying under them or jump three feet to the bed so no hands swipe out from underneath it! That kind. So if you are too then you know where that line comes from. Silent Hill. (The first one not the dumb second one.) But that line… oh that line still haunts me, and not for the right reasons.

It’s true. Mommy can do no wrong in the eyes of the child. Not until that child grows up that is.

My daughter stayed home with me yesterday and I held her tight. Told her stories of her babyhood and giggled like girls. We had fun. She must have said to me that I was the best mommy ever like 30 times. It weighed on me. Mommy is God in the eyes of the child. It weighed heavily on me. I am my own worst critic and so I am always evaluating my own actions. This one sweet phrase from my baby girl sent my brain into a tornado like spin. Every thing I’ve yelled, every criticism I’d given, every time I’d shrugged away a hug while washing the dishes or loading the dryer just piled up on my soul. If you are a mother you know what I am saying because no matter how small your sin, you remember it. I carry mine with me. I think of them often and I live in almost fear of them sometimes. Fear that my kids will be taken from me for these sins. If you don’t appreciate what you have it will be gone. While they are small this is my fear. Fear that I can not protect them from every evil there is or from to world, and fear that my little moments of flaw will add up to one big universal IOU. Will they be taken from me if I do not relish every last moment with them as if it were the last. Take nothing for granted.

If I manage to make it past their youthful years into adulthood will they then come to collect on my bad debts? Will they languish over those shrugged off hugs or moments of yelling anger?   Will that be what they remember?

Every moment I ask myself these questions. I wonder if I am making mistakes and if they are the big kind that one can hardly pay for in one lifetime. Who has the answers? Guilt is the hairshirt I wear.