I Should Have Hugged Her

I’m almost done. Just a few more lines, I thought to myself as I typed the last few commands of the computer program I was creating on my mom’s new Texas Instruments computer.

It was 1983, and personal computers were brand new. I was ten years old, and Mom had taken me with her to a community class on computers. The graphics in these dinosaur PCs were even more archaic and block-head looking than Minecraft. The screen was all black except for the blocks you put there by the commands you typed in, one numbered line at a time. 10 do this, 20 do that, 30 go to 10, up to as many lines as you’d like to type.

I didn’t know how to write and create programs, but we had a magazine with pages of programs to choose from that you could type up yourself. So I picked one and spent an entire day typing the thing out. I don’t even remember what it was supposed to do by the time I would have finished because just as I was almost done, my mom tripped the electricity that powered the computer. There were no batteries in them yet back then either.

All my hours of work had vanished in an instant, but surprisingly my mom was more upset about it than I was. I loved to type (and still do), so I figured I’d just start over again.

I don’t remember my mom ever showing so much compassion for me over something she’d done. She looked devastated when she came running into the living room where the desk held the computer.

“Oh no! I’m so sorry! You’ve been working on that all day long. I can’t believe I did that.”

She kept on apologizing for what seemed like forever.

“It’s ok Mom. I’ll just start over.”

“Oh, but you’ve worked so hard, and I was so proud of how focused you were. I was looking forward to seeing what it would do when you were done,” she apologized again.

She stood a few feet away from me as she apologized, and her shoulders seemed slumped and she looked so sad. I thought I should hug her, but in our family, and in my mind, hugs were for posing for pictures and saying goodbye and goodnight. They weren’t for conflict or sad times. So I didn’t hug her.

That moment has never escaped me. But instead of dreading over not realizing that I should have been the one to initiate the hug, I’ve taken it as a lessen in motherhood.

Whenever I mess up as a mom, I know I need a hug. I know my kids need a hug. We all need some physical connection to break the tension and breathe and connect.

So I hug my kids all the time. I hug them when things are going great, I hug them when they mess up, I hug them when I mess up, I hug them when we’re sad. Hugs are just so great for families to work through conflict, to celebrate, to grieve, to reconnect after a long day apart.

I’ve even found that hugs are magical to help pre-teen girls release emotions that they didn’t know were there and don’t know what they’re there for or what to do with them. It’s amazing to not have to know what to say or do and realize that a hug is the simple answer.

My kids have grown so used to my hugs over the years, that they now hug me all the time. Practically every time we enter and leave a room I or they will initiate a hug, all throughout the day. It’s a beautiful constant to have in place.

I missed out on an opportunity to connect with my mom, but the recognition of it has turned into a beautiful practice for me and my children, her grandchildren, who she never got a chance to meet.

This picture of us what the last birthday I celebrated with her, her 47th birthday, just a few months before we got the new computer.

It’s almost as if I get a do-over of that moment every time I hug my kids, as if she gets to hug them, they get to hug her, and I get to hug her at last, all at once as I hug my kids.