by Kristin Castle

Created on: April 23, 2009

Recently, a friend presented me with a question. If we knew God's greater plan, or why we are meant to endure such things, would that make it any easier? I have spent countless nights pleading to God in an effort to change his plan for my mother. But I will never forget the moment my pleas changed from "please God, see my mother through this one more time" to "God please take her and end this battle."

My mother spent many years of her life striving for perfection and always trying to please everyone. She fought many a losing battle and I remember my father often telling her to stop trying to save the world. Life is full of let downs when you have such good intentions.

She was a dedicated wife whose only mistake was choosing a mate who had no interest in pretending to be perfect. He tried to teach her to focus on the good rather than dwell on the bad. But she was not ready for this liberating approach and perhaps resented the fact that it came so easily to him.

She was a dedicated teacher in a school district that recognized her special ability to handle the worst kids they could throw at her, only to have them turn their backs on her and accuse her of being too harsh on those kids. I often run into her former students who tell me, with a residual look of fear in their eyes, that she was tough. So tough that they wish their kid had a teacher just like her!

And she was a dedicated mother who raised a son who seemed to master the art of at least "appearing" to be perfect, and a daughter who spent her teen years resenting the very idea of such unrealistic expectations and often found pleasure in throwing her rebellious imperfections in her poor mother's face.

Being a mother now myself, I have learned a lot about just how perfectly imperfect my mother was. It wasn't perfection she was demanding from others; it was simply her want to see her loved ones, and even those rotten students, be the best people they could be. And she was always harder on herself than she was on anyone else when those people fell short. I have no doubt, for instance, that the lessons in tough love that she was forced to teach her idiot teenage daughter were more hurtful for her than they were for that foolish young girl.

In the last leg of her time here on earth, she became a grandmother. Her never ending, soul searching journey to find herself seemed to stop dead in its tracks the moment she met her first grandchild. She was happy to simply be Grandma and never seemed to struggle with that role

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