These Are the Good Old Days

by Molly Magid Hoagland

It's Mother's Day; I'm always good for brunch and a little reflection. My mother died when I was a young woman, still with my adulthood undefined and my children unimagined. Now fifteen years and a couple lifetimes later, I have a family of my own. My mother left me with a sense that the obligations--really the instincts--of motherhood are true sympathy and elemental love. But of course motherhood has its dark moments. After her death I read some decades-old journal entries; in one she berates herself for yelling so loud at five-year-old me that I was terrified, hands clapped over my ears--"I will never do that again" she vows guiltily. I don't remember that incident at all, nor any other episodes of scary yelling, and the fact that I don't is a great comfort to me in my worst moments as a mother.

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