Jacksonville author: Moms may not know everything, but love more forgiving than math

When I had my first child, a friend sent me flowers with a card that read, “You know more than you think you do.”

Au contraire — I knew nothing.

Those early days of motherhood felt like ninth-grade algebra all over again. I failed algebra. I didn’t know how to solve for X to determine the time Tammy would get to her grandma’s house if she was driving 53 mph; had 315 miles to travel; and needed to stop 3 miles off the highway to buy strawberry-banana flavored Hubba Bubba chewing gum with the $1.50 she had in her pocket.

Nor did I have any idea how to compute how much sleep deprivation it takes to enter a state of psychosis where hallucinations begin to appear of Tammy blowing giant pink bubbles big enough to make her car fly like in the movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” I just knew I was close to that level of sleep-deprived psychosis after only the first week of motherhood.

Days were a rotation of nursing, changing diapers, moving my son from the bouncy seat to the swing to the second bouncy seat, back into my arms where I jiggled and cooed and sang ridiculous songs of my making while I paced the house careful not to trip on the baby paraphernalia that multiplied like some other kind of advanced math that used exponentials and ellipses into infinity.

My children are grown now. I’m no longer on the carousel of routines, rules, homework schedules, extracurricular activities, adolescent moodiness or teenage drama. Things are quiet, sometimes uncomfortably so. I miss the strangest things too — such as the orange clay at the threshold of the front door from their baseball cleats and the smell of their hair at the end of the school day.

I can still picture my oldest son grinning amid the branches of the crape myrtle tree that he would climb every day after school, and I can hear my younger son’s laugh exploding like endless bubbles of carbonation.

Through all of it, I felt like I knew nothing or certainly not enough. I suppose loving someone that intensely — that fiercely, that desperately — would make anyone feel like an inadequate caregiver. After all, more than anything, you just want your kids to be OK.

That’s not as easy as it sounds in a world where they are expected to fit in, stand out, be exceptional, win, achieve and document it all on social media with fabulous hair and unnaturally white teeth. As such, there’s a lot of things we mothers may never be able to solve for our children.

But loving them unconditionally, even as imperfectly as we sometimes do, is always the best answer to whatever problems they encounter. As much as I sometimes want to tell my boys how to do this or that and most especially, why it’s important to not overstuff the washing machine (which incidentally, they do anyway).

Letters: Competition with charters may improve education in Duval County Schools

I remind myself there’s Google, books and a world full of know-it-alls to teach them all sorts of things. Yet there is no one who will love them like their mama. It’s a fierce and holy force that we mothers hope our children will carry with them through their toughest days.

This love is an embrace that encourages them to begin again. It’s a smile that assures them that they are loved just as they are and a look that reminds them that they are never alone.

We mothers may not know everything, but love is more forgiving than math so hopefully when our children encounter our imperfections, they will be too. Perhaps, I didn’t know as much as I should have when I was raising my children. But unconditional love is also like fancy math with exponentials and ellipses that go to infinity. Isn’t that all we (and they) really need to know?

Lara Patangan is an inspirational author and speaker who writes about faith at LaraPatangan.com. Her first book, “Simple Mercies,” is available now.

This guest column is the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Times-Union. We welcome a diversity of opinions.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Mother's love encourages, reassures, reminds kids they are never alone