I'm pretty sure just about anyone was more prepared to be a mother than me. It's not that I was too young; I was 29 when my first was born. It was not that I didn't want a child; I had felt that preternatural yearning for the last half of my twenties. My problem was I had no experience with these small mysterious creatures called children. I could not remember a time I had even held an infant, much less had responsibility for keeping it alive for 24 hours at a time. My babysitting gigs as a teenager could be counted on one hand.

As for my own upbringing, being a child was like being a small adult. My parents preferred the topics of education, philosophy, classical music, and art over Go Fish and Shoots and Ladders. Game night consisted of my searingly articulate father playing a bruising game of Scrabble (the only game allowed in the house) against my mother, my brother, and me—the three of us huddled around one tray of pills. My father would always, always win. Being a nuisance to my older brother and with no neighborhood children within a fifteen mile radius of our rural home, I played alone by reading books, roaming the woods, and talking to my dolls. Playing Mommy with my Chatty Cathy was the extent of my maternal skill development.

After reading a raft of baby “manuals”, still convinced of my mothering incompetence, I treated motherhood like the time I struggled through a mystifying college calculus class: I was determined to pass the course even if all I could do was simply show up everyday and muddle through. But by the second child, almost seven years later, I had enough evidence from raising the first one to see that my skills were not as calamitous as I originally thought. At least now I could see that my mothering was not only survivable, but perhaps even the tiniest bit OK.

Fast forward 35 years, I see now how right I was that I was BOTH clueless AND more than OK as a mother. That contradictory state of simultaneously doing the wrong thing and the right thing is the very definition of motherhood. As it turned out, those mysterious small creatures called children were in fact each their own unknowable being who threw tantrums for reasons I never fathomed and who wandered in cities I would never know about until years later (if ever). So much of what they felt or thought, or even the actions they took, would happen without me. It's as if I was never in control in the first place.

Of course, I did have some control and influence. I fed them well. I educated them. I kept them safe. I taught them kindness and open-mindedness and curiosity. I also passed on my anxiety, my incessant people-pleasing, and my proclivity for addiction to substances and work. I see now how my distractibility, anxiety, addiction, and obsession with my career skirted dangerously with neglect, or at least with emotional unavailability. But having worked mightily to forgive myself, I have lived the gift of forgiveness. Having survived addiction, divorce, and financial stress, I have lived the gift of surviving adversity. Having pretended instead of being myself, I have lived the gift of self-honesty. It reminds me that even as I railed against my raging alcoholic father, I received the gift of enlightenment: that I would raise my children with more tenderness and acceptance than I had received; and I did.

Seeing my grown children now, each much less mysterious now than when they were 4 or 12 or even 21, I think what was and still is most important, is simply seeing them as they are. Each uniquely driven by a cocktail of genes and a storm of parenting patterns, who for better or worse has a purpose, a drive, a desire to be expressed and loved. Mothering is about seeing the fullest picture of her child she can possibly muster and loving all of that singular character for as long as it takes for her child to know and love his or her own self.

Perhaps just as crucial, is allowing ourselves to mother ourselves. Don't we all just want to be seen as we truly are and loved through the confusion of developing our own moral compass and exercising our freewill? Looking back with loving eyes, I see myself as a young mother who used what she had at the time to do the best that she could—and seeing her children now, it was enough. Our job is not to make all the right choices; in fact, wrong choices are necessary for learning and growth. The promise of what our children struggle with is wisdom, compassion, and strength. We mothers, of any age, have plenty of that, we just don't realize it until after the crisis passes.

Meanwhile, what there is to do is regret less, worry less, and SEE more. We stand as witnesses to the fullness of our children's unfolding, seeing them and loving them on their path towards their own true selves. The sight line down that path will be so much clearer if we move our bruised and guilty egos out of the way!