Things We Learn From Our Mothers

Katie Lyke | Austin Motherhood Photographer

The striped shirt in my closet always makes me think of my mom.

Not because it is rare or sentimental in the traditional sense. It’s simple. It goes with everything. It is the kind of thing I reach for all the time, which is probably exactly why it reminds me of her.

My mom has always loved a good horizontal striped shirt. I think she has owned, or at least tried on, hundreds of them over the years, and at some point, I stopped seeing stripes without thinking of her.

As Mother’s Day gets closer, I keep thinking about the things we learn from our mothers without realizing it. Not the big speeches or the formal lessons, but the small repeated things. The things they say over and over until they settle into us. The habits we absorb just by being near them. The way their preferences become part of our own language for love, beauty, practicality, faith, comfort, and care.

My mom and I are shoppers. It’s something we’ve always done together.

From as early as I can remember, we walked through malls together. We looked for clothes, mostly for me. We touched fabrics, held things up, tried things on, and made decisions slowly. Or, at least, she made decisions slowly. I wanted the thing immediately. She wanted to check the care tag to see if it was Dry Clean Only. We usually left these items behind, which felt wildly dramatic to me at the time. Like, surely we could make an exception for this one perfect dress, right? But now, as a grown woman with laundry piles and children and a life that does not exactly make room for delicate garment care, I understand completely.

She knew the reality of the life we lived.

She knew I was not especially careful with clothes. She knew some things would become a headache instead of a joy. She was teaching me, in the middle of a department store dressing room, to choose things that fit my real life, not my imaginary one.

She noticed details too. If a pattern was crooked or the seams seemed off, she noticed. It used to drive me crazy because I just wanted the thing, and she wanted to know if the thing was made well. But now I see the care in that. She was teaching me to pay attention. To notice quality. To understand that how something is made matters.

And isn’t that motherhood in so many ways? These tiny, ordinary moments that don’t feel significant at the time, but somehow become part of the way we move through the world.

After I had my second child, my mom told me something about motherhood that stayed with me. She said she tried to say yes when she could.

She looked for ways to say yes.

And when I think back, I can see it everywhere.

A McDonald’s fruit and yogurt parfait before school after dropping my brother off at school. Ice skating at the Galleria. Driving my friends and me to the movies (and picking us up late—I’m exhausted just thinking about it). A small treat. A little detour. A moment that may have been one more thing on an already full day for her, and I didn’t understand then what I understand now—that she was probably tired too, and she said yes anyway.

But one of the moments that stayed with me most wasn’t a yes to something I had asked for. It was her seeing what I needed before I knew how to ask.

There was one day in fifth grade when I was having a hard time with all the feelings and hormones and the general emotional chaos of being a preteen girl. She pulled me out of school. We went shopping. We had lunch. We even had to sneak around the corner of the school so my brother wouldn’t see us from the cafeteria.

I remember that day because she saw me.

She didn’t fix everything. She didn’t need to. She simply made room for tenderness.

And now, as a mother myself, I think about my own daughters, and I hope I remember to do the same for them someday. I hope I remember that sometimes love looks like structure and boundaries, but sometimes love sounds like an unexpected yes. Sometimes love is noticing when your child needs a break from the world, even if only for an afternoon.

My mom is an encourager. She always has been.

Every year for Christmas, she asks for a Mary Engelbreit tear-off calendar. She reads the pages each day, but she also saves the ones that remind her of people she loves. Then she turns them into cards. She adds magazine clippings, Bible verses, handwritten notes, and words of encouragement, and she sends them when someone needs to feel seen.

Recently, she sent one just to remind me that I am doing a great job. And as moms, we need to hear that, don’t we?

We need someone to remind us that the invisible work matters. The early mornings matter. The packing of lunches and wiping of counters and folding of impossibly tiny clothes matters. The small choices matter. The love we pour out every single day, even when no one seems to notice or say thank you, matters.

This Mother’s Day, I keep thinking about the long line of women before me. Women who had babies and raised them with the best information they had at the time. Women who passed down habits and hopes and preferences and faith and strength and tenderness, whether they realized it or not.

I am part of that tightly woven web, and so are you.

And I know Mother’s Day can be joyful and sweet, but also complicated and tender. For many, it holds gratitude and grief at the same time. It can bring up what we had, what we lost, what we longed for, what we are still healing from, and what we hope to pass on differently.

But maybe this year, we can also notice what stayed.

The striped shirt.

The care tags.

The core memories of time spent together.

The lunch out of school.

The handwritten note.

The thing she said so many times that it became part of how we live.

And maybe, when I wonder if I am doing a good job as a mother, I can remember that I am not starting from nothing.

Our own motherhood is shaped by all the small things our mothers gave us before we even knew we were receiving them. The habits, the words, the instincts, the softness, the strength. The ordinary moments that become part of how we love our own children.

And so when those times (inevitably) come when we wonder if we are doing enough or getting it right or being a good mom, let’s look back at the women who loved us first and remember that we learned from the best.