I’ve spent a great deal of my 6+years as a mother making peace with my own troubled relationship with my mom, a fact I doubt places me in a different position than countless other women.  The process has been one of starting and stopping, largely because my mother has been dead now for a decade.

Whenever I’m asked to write about motherhood, my default is to dig into this process and its results (which, admittedly, have come with varying degrees of success).  But this time around I’m going to try a different path.

See, one of the peculiar parts of growing up quasi-motherless is that I tended to find replacements.  Surrogate moms, I’ll call them. 

These women almost always appeared in my life through school or work and always took me under their wings as a pupil of promise.  Their mentoring was designed, I think, to pass the baton of female leadership in the male-dominated worlds of law and academics. 

Once my son was born though this process stopped.  I’m going to go ahead and say I unintentionally stopped looking for women to fill that void of learning and guidance of my other surrogate moms, though I don’t know if that is true.  Because now that my son is in elementary school and I now have a strong-willed and independent daughter of my own, I’m feeling a little adrift. 

To be honest I could use a mom.

I could use someone who knows me and who can tell me that my pearl-clutching over my children’s development is normal (or not, who knows).  I could use a mom to tell me that it doesn’t matter that I don’t sew or bake or craft Halloween costumes because none of that matters.  I could use a mom to tell me, from time to time, that I’m doing okay.

And I’ll admit.  I could use a mom for all that. Not for my kids, but for me.

Parenthood has rattled my confidence and weaken my knees.  Sure I put up a great front but I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and I have no measure to check.  And maybe you don’t know this about me, but I need a measure the same way Lisa Simpson needs a grade-- as some kind of indicator that it is all okay.  The whole sticky mess.

Those surrogates that I’ve collected over the years helped drive me to professional successes I never even imagined.  They believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself.  And isn’t that the very essence of a mom--that vehicle of faith that guides you through the darkness when you are sure there will never be light again.

Can I be that for my kids when I don’t have that for myself?  I don’t know.  I’m trying.  Which is I guess all any of us are doing.