Opinion - I was at my wits’ end. Despite giving my child everything he could possibly need, he had the audacity to tell me I should not be asking him to do well at school.
He saw us as failures for not being multi-millionaires, living in mansions, driving fancy cars and going on holiday.
“I hate you mummy, I hate you.” The words pierced me.
I told him how lucky he was.
When we were children, we would have been beaten to a pulp for speaking like that, and it took me back to the woman accused of beating her 4-year-old daughter.
I wondered how she was feeling at that time. I listened to each thing she told her child as she beat her.
It seemed to me that with every strike, she explained herself.
She kept saying she was losing her mind and on the brink of a nervous breakdown and would soon be found dead.
I later viewed her Facebook wall and saw photographs of her and her daughter, telling her child how much she loved her and was proud of her.
I am nowhere close to living an impoverished life, yet my son took me to a point of such rage, I thought I was going to break.
But I taught him to be entitled to everything and how to treat and speak to me.
So what makes a woman a bad mother?
I remember the moment I made the choice to hate my mother for life.
The reason? She left me behind and took my sister with her on many occasions, like I was not good enough.
She criticised how I dressed, styled my hair, my weight, even the men I dated.
I promised myself that when I became a mother, I would be the mother I wished I had. Was I now turning into my mother?
Everyone else thought she was amazing and the truth is, she is.
She is fabulous and the “go to” person for everyone, and almost everyone I know wishes she was their mother.
But for me, she was my biggest enemy. Her challenge was she had to work hard to provide for us.
The only times she had with us was when it felt like she was criticising us.
I was recently part of a panel for students who had to pitch film project ideas and almost every single film dealt with “bad mothers”. What was going on?
When did we lose the essence of what a mother is supposed to be?
According to the dictionary, “a mother is a protector, disciplinarian and friend”.
I was talking to mothers at school discussing plans for Mother’s Day.
Everyone had plans for themselves, but not for their mothers.
Every one of them told me how they disliked their moms, how irritating they were, how they favoured one child over the other, how they had double standards.
It all got me thinking. My son told me he hated me because he did not get his way.
He became so accustomed to me being his friend that when I was the mother first, he turned on me. Was I a bad mother? No!
What is the definition of a child? An offspring of two adults who is the responsibility of those adults until they are of the age where they can fend for themselves.
And I wondered, in the hate and animosity we have for our mothers, have we ever taken a moment to think of the situations they could possibly be in and what they are going through?
Do we consider the type of children we are to them before we consider what we expect from them? I thought again of my own mother.
I realised that everything she did and said was not to harm me, but to force me to be better according to what she knew and who she was as a person.
To this day, she is my greatest critic and I love her for it, but I hated her for stopping me from who I thought I wanted to be.
I asked her why I wasn’t good enough. She said: “When I look at you I see strength, resilience and power and I know nothing will stop you from life.
"You happen to life; it doesn’t happen to you, but as my child I knew the only way to get you to the top was to challenge you.
“You are a rebel and will always prove you can do anything, especially when you believe you have something to prove.”
That’s exactly who I am. I wasted so much time hating her when I could have loved her with all of me.
Yes, we may dislike our mothers and think they don’t care based on what we believe a mother should be.
But there is no perfect way to be a good mother.
Each situation is unique. Each mother has different challenges, different skills and different abilities and the one thing is evident above all else - they each certainly have very different children.
Before we start to hate, we have to remember they gave us the best gift on Earth - life.
They come from a different time and value system, so it’s obvious they will never completely understand but what are we doing to close that gap instead of making it wider? You choose life.