Reply #323: It's possible your mom is trying to say "Don't be like me" and "I'm sorry, please forgive me" and...

[Hekate]

... and especially "Learn from me and space your kids."

And yes, I can imagine an overwhelmed mother being that desperate. I have a friend, a colleague from grad school, who is #5 of 17 kids. She wrote a beautiful family biography for her dissertation, full of in-depth interviews with all of her sibs (both her parents had passed away by then). It is hair-raising to read. Everyone outside the family (especially the parish priest) said how wonderful to have such a clan, but inside it was anything but. All the interviews start with, "What a great childhood," and toward the middle all of them have a scene like, "God there was that time I looked out the window and saw Ma in the car with a hose leading from the tailpipe into the car," or, "I spent hours underneath the laundry pile because it was the only place I could get any peace," and everything in between. And most of them sooner or later said they wished their parents had stopped having kids after they, personally, were born. My friend has only two kids; none of her sibs has a big family.

It's funny, Grace, I'm the oldest in my family, with 3 younger sibs, and I was pressed into service from the age of six. That's fine, it made me feel like a big girl that Mom could depend upon. But of course there's so much more to the story than that.

In addition to the 4 of us, my mom had 3 others: a full-term stillbirth and 2 first-trimester miscarriages that nearly killed her with hemorrhaging. This was all within the space of 9 1/2 years. I'm the oldest. I remember, and the others really don't. It had an impact on her health. Mom had her problems, but she loved us; nonetheless I only have two kids.

All the things I overheard or that she said about herself and her sisters and grandma, I somehow took as lessons that I was supposed to figure out and apply to myself, sometimes in reverse. Maybe that's your Mom's lesson-in-reverse for you. Who knows...

Hekate