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Jessica has always been there for me when I needed her most, especially because I was still a single mom when my son Michael died. Jessica came instantly from Utah to be with the rest
of the family in Las Vegas. In those first few days, when I was blind with grief and only able to hug my children and cry, it was Jessica who took over as the efficient and calming maternal presence. She got breakfast and lunch for the younger kids every day, made sure they cleaned up their rooms, brushed their hair, and put on clean clothes. She helped make sure the house was kept in order and organized the flowers and food that came to the front door. She threw in loads of laundry. She stayed up late and got up early and listened to every emotion that any of the younger kids wanted to express, denying her personal need to grieve until later.

Whatever Jessica and I have been through as family, I know that we were always meant to be mother and daughter. From the moment the social worker in California called me to come for my new baby girl and the nurse put her in my arms, I knew she was mine. In fact, right before that happened, the nurse had accidentally pointed me to another bassinet, holding someone else’s infant. As adorable as that baby was, I somehow felt strongly that a mistake had been made. Moments later, apologizing profusely, the nurse told me that my baby was in a different room, apart from the regular nursery. And there she was, the child whose face I had envisioned in my thoughts and prayers. I had even described her in my journal long before she came into my life. Finding my daughter in a “different room” has always been a bit of a humorous metaphor for our whole relationship. We aren’t always in the same “room” as far as how we each think, but we will always be mother and daughter, and that bond is unbreakable.

As parents, many of us believe that it is our responsibility
to teach our children, but I’ve found we are also here to learn from these special spirits that we have been blessed to raise. When it came to parenting, my sweet mother would tell me,
“It’s like an hourglass on a table. You think that you have put in the time and that you have it all figured out now. And then the hourglass gets turned over by something unexpected or a life change and you find yourself having to learn more patience and grow even more as a
mother.”
Like sand through the hourglass…these are the days of our parenting lives!

The best we can do as parents is to teach and lead by example, then stand aside as our children learn to govern themselves. Through our unconditional love we need to support them, even if their personal beliefs are in conflict with our beliefs about what is best for them.

On one of Jessica’s recent visits, she sat next to me for a while as I scrolled through hundreds of family photos on my laptop to choose some for a school project for my youngest son. I realized that I really wasn’t in many of them. It was hard for me to find candid photos of me with my kids.

I said to Jessica, “I can see why you thought I was never there for you. There are hardly any pictures of family events with me in them.”

When she turned to look at me, there was not a single ounce of triumph in her eyes. “You were a working mother,” Jessica said. “You did the best you could. Besides, you were there. I remember it.”

I turned to look at my adult daughter, who is now, thanks to time, effort, and healing, also my friend. “You do?” I asked.

“Yes, Mom. You were always the person taking the picture.”

Happy to be sandwiched between two incredibly strong women: my mother, Olive May, and my daughter, Jessica Marie.

My family just months before my brothers stepped into the spotlight on the
Andy Williams Show:
(clockwise from left) Jay, Alan, Tom, Virl, Wayne, Father, Donny, Merrill, Mother, and me. Jimmy would join the family a year later.

M
y oldest brother wasn’t “brought by the stork,” but he was carried around like he was, at least the first couple of days of his life.

My mother, who was just twenty, had almost no prior experience with babies. She had been an only child for ten years until her baby brother came along. She wrote in her journal, about her firstborn, Virl:
“I didn’t even know how to pick him up properly. I was so afraid of hurting him or kinking his little neck. I would wrap the blanket real tight around him and then pick him up, holding the blanket with both hands, one over his chest and one over his knees.”

My father told me how my mother would gather the corners of the blanket and carry the baby as if in a sling. When the nurses would come in to change him, my mother was terrified by how swiftly they handled her infant and would cry out, “Please don’t drop him!” This was back in the mid-1940s when a woman stayed in the hospital for almost two weeks after she had had a baby. How much wiser was that than our current hospital policy of sending new mothers home twenty-four hours after delivery? It makes me wonder if so many
reported cases of extreme baby blues, postpartum depression, and even infant illnesses could be prevented if the mother was given time to recover and rest for a few more days, and learn to care for her baby while she is being cared for herself.

Thankfully, my mother’s roommate in the hospital was a woman who had just given birth to her fifth child. She may have been secretly very amused by my young mother’s first-time nerves, but my mother remembered her as being kind and helpful and answering her string of questions about raising children. One of the first things the experienced roommate told my mother was “Babies aren’t all that fragile.”

Perhaps babies aren’t all that fragile, but new mothers are. It doesn’t seem to matter if a woman becomes a mom for the first time at twenty or thirty-four or forty-two—there is an undeniable shift in perspective and priorities that leaves you feeling as if you are permanently relocated to a brand-new world. You are, within hours, a woman who now holds in your arms another life that is completely dependent upon you for everything. It probably wouldn’t be so overwhelming if the baby could at least talk and verbalize his needs. But I understand God’s wisdom in having that
not
be the case. New mothers want to fall in love with their babies, and even though infants cry, it would be a whole other story if they could verbally complain right out of the gate. Can you imagine your newborn saying, “Really?
Ducks
on my blanket? Hello! I’m going to be a dog person.”

When my mother went home from the hospital, she put her newborn’s bassinet right next to her bed so she could hear him all
night long, breathing in and breathing out. She was endlessly concerned about
“a rattle sound”
in Virl’s throat, which the pediatricians told her was normal. All night long she would jump to her feet at his slightest whimper to see what her baby needed.

I’m not sure my mother ever got another good night’s sleep until 1981, when my brother Jimmy, her last child, turned nineteen and my parents went on a church mission to Hawaii. Actually, by then she usually had one or two or seventeen of the grandbabies around, so any slumber lasting more than a couple of hours was a very, very distant memory.

In a journal entry from November of 1945, my mother wrote about rocking her baby for hours at night while reading
Parents
magazine or anything she could find to
“make me be a good mother.”

I have a hard time envisioning my mom feeling uneasy about her caretaking skills. She had an ease and confidence by the time I came on the scene, but I can tell by the entries in her journals that she worried constantly as a first-time mother.

I had never felt a bigger sense of accomplishment than when I gave birth to my firstborn at age twenty-three. No chart-topping single, or hit TV show, or part in a movie had ever made me feel that I was a part of creating something wonderful more than holding my newborn son for the first time. I dissolved my sense of self into his spirit, and his link to me was, and still is, unbreakable. I felt the calm that comes with knowing what the purpose of life is about. I wanted to suspend that feeling into eternity.

Like my mother, though I didn’t know it then, I was a fragile first-time mom, not physically, but emotionally. Giving birth to my son replaced the “Marie Osmond” that I had come to accept as me, and left me feeling vulnerable when I thought of what the future would hold. I had spent years learning how to have “stage legs,” as they say, but wasn’t as confident about having “mommy arms.”

All of the facets of my career life that I had so carefully monitored before, like weight, fashion, concert tour schedules, photo shoots, press appearances, and more became diminished in importance by things like a baby monitor. It was a terrifying transition for me, but I went forward with enthusiastic naïveté until I became utterly depleted. I was exhausted by my own expectations.

When you are a first-time mom, I think you want to believe that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to take care of a child’s needs, until you gradually begin to understand how unpredictable being a parent can be. I was used to growing up in the entertainment business, where you rehearsed until you got it right and then, and
only then
, did you present it to other people. With a baby, there was no rehearsal, so I became preoccupied with making sure everything was “right” from the start, from sterilizing everything until it almost melted, to daily bleaching the burp cloths and bibs, to every baby accessory a nursery could possibly hold, to making certain his little outfit matched from head to toe with a coordinating blanket and hat. Also, like my mother before me, I had to have my baby right next to me at all times so that I could hear him
breathing in and breathing out. I would hold him in my arms for hours on end and would only sleep if he could be nearby. This was true for each of my babies. I could only rest myself if they were within arm’s reach.

In theory, it all sounded good. But what it meant in practicality was the extreme opposite. If my infant’s pacifier dropped into the car seat momentarily, then I’d have to choose between a possible germ that might have clung to it or a wailing son for the next fifteen miles. Using a burp cloth only once meant a huge stack of laundry by the end of the day. Also, if some spit-up landed on his blanket, then my only option was changing his entire outfit as well to maintain my “coordinates” plan.

About a month into being a mom, I fully understood that my “bundle of joy” was also a “pack of projectile
everything,
” and the beautiful “mother and child” image that I had always pictured in my head was now wet-wiped with reality.

I used to wonder why my mother never told me the “truth” about being a first-time mom. When I was certain I could be a perfect mother, she would smile and nod and say something like “I’m sure you’ll do fine.” She never tried to talk me out of my expectations, even though her own knowledge of taking care of a newborn was so great she could have written a baby book.