My Mom. A Human Being? No.WAY.

Some people hate lots of things.  Broccoli or traffic.  Cigarette smoke or Splenda. The Lakers or the Yankees.

I’m not like that.  I don’t have a lot of hate feelings.  I can “take or leave” lots of things, but there are few things I’ve ever really hated.

My mother is definitely one of those things, though.  Let me be completely trite and state that this is only because I love my mother, to quote my daughter, “all the way to the top of God and back.”

Of the six years that I was a teenager, there was a four year period when I flip-flopped between adoring my mother and being so angry with her that, yes, I hated her.

My mom wouldn’t let me stay out late with my friends.  Once, she forbid me from keeping company with a certain person who I thought was just the most spectacular human on the planet. I got especially angry with her when she enforced the “no sleeping over at anyone’s house” rule in high school.  Yes.  For real.

These things, though, were not what sparked my hate.  In fact, the times I hated my mother the most had nothing to do with these (BOGUS!!) rules or her telling me what to do (ALL.THE.TIME!!).

The most awful arguments that my mother and I had, the ones that would result in the dreaded “I HATE YOU” proclamation from me were because I was realizing something about my mother that I didn’t want to know… something that was changing everything.

Something that once I finally knew it, I would never be able to un-know.

My mother was… a human being?!

Like, a person… like… any plain other freaking person?

My mother… makes MISTAKES?

Has character flaws?  RIDICULOUS. I can still hear my sixteen year old self fume, Who does this woman think she is?!!  A person like this has NO BUSINESS being a parent.

So, yeah, I hated my mom.

I hated that she sometimes cared more about what other people thought than the right thing to do.

I hated her when she sometimes made mistakes about who she should trust.

I hated her when she sometimes let herself get in the way of her really seeing me.

I hated her when I saw that she was sometimes capable of being very cruel.

I hated her when she did things that every single other person on the planet sometimes does.

Then, years and years later, I became a mom.

And, what do you know, I’m a human being.

Like, a person… like… any other plain freaking person.

Believe it or not, I never hated my mom again after that.