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When people ask me what it's like to work with my mother: The woman who would stop an 18 car freight locomotive in order to save my life. The woman who would save me from sudden death in a fire along with her favorite diamonds; I like to tell them this story.
*Ahem*
I'm on her side of our office floor speaking to a colleague. I'm on one side of an open area and she is on the other. I'm having a work related conversation and she is standing on the other side of the office with one of her administrative staff. A woman named Mary who is an older grandmotherly type who bakes carrot cake from scratch and knows how to perfectly fix a hole in a favorite knit dress. I'm mid-conversation and hardly paying attention but whenever my mother speaks my ears perk up which is an obvious manifestation of spending a lifetime with a woman who said things once and only once and if you didn't hear her that one time then you were going to be left in a grocery store parking lot. With my left ear still on the conversation and my right ear towards her I suddenly hear, "Stand up straight! Suck that stomach in". It isn't said loudly but in a whisper that can only be fully heard and grasped in a relationship such as the one between a mother and her daughter.
Anyway, with that statement laser beams shot out of my eyes while kept nodding along and she shot me the "Wuh?!" look while I wished I could bean her in the head with an ice cube. That isn't my violent streak talking but the "MO-OM" said in two syllables, "OH MY GOD! You are SUCH an embarrassment". And with that, I pulled my shoulders back a little more and pulled in my protruding belly.
That's a story that sums up roughly 18 months of stories of how one copes with working with a parent. Here's the thing that I never realized until I became friends with parents and it's another one of those things that can only be appreciated after the age of 17; but parents, with their incessant need to help and comment and seemingly interfere because they only want what is best for their offspring? That biological mechanism to stop the aformentioned freight trains and to protect their babies? They cannot turn it off. They cannot turn it off ever. No matter the age of the child and no matter what position their child is in; they cannot possibly stop that Pavlovian reflex to jump in.
There are days when I want to tell her to back off and have. I tell her not to protect me and when she attempts to give me helpful suggestions that are purely the manifestation of more time on the job and with The People, I still tell her to hold off and let me handle it - the situation, the people - myself. I need to learn that and embrace that and they need to understand that while I am my mother's daughter I am also not my mother's daughter. Our behaviors couldn't be more asymmetrical and it is my belief that those around us need to understand that she doesn't do things just because she is my mother and I don't do things just because I am her daughter. We are two separate people and I think that that is lost among the rest of the office when they see two people who look a like with the same last name. They think of a team or of nepotism. I want them to see individuals with different positions and different approaches to their jobs. Hence the reason for my incessant need to keep her at arm's length.
But there is always a but. A caveat and part of biochemical engineering that part ingrained in most all of us that reaches out to mommy in times of crisis. So I look to her not just as a higher up in the management circle but she is and always will be my mother first and foremost. My instinct is to go to her no matter what the problem is; when I feel that dread of work or stress or on the brink of tears, she still has that mama bear instinct to comfort and protect.
Working with a parent brings out the best and worst of both worlds and something most impossible to understand
