The Good Mother
I have caught myself more than once whispering under my breath that I’m a mean mom. It’s usually after my kids didn’t listen to something I asked the first 20 times, so I raised my voice. I yelled. And then I immediately felt bad.
I always apologize, yet that doesn’t feel like enough after making a child cry. Then I feel even worse because my 10 year old and 3 year old come to my emotional aid and tell me I am a wonderful mom when I should be comforting them. Of course I do comfort them, but it all turns into a giant roundabout fest of emotions. And I always tell myself, and my kids, that I will work on the yelling, and let’s all work on listening better, and we have a nice talk and then nothing changes.
Does this make me a bad mom?
I tell myself there are worse things than occasionally yelling, and it is occasional. It’s when I am tired, the sensory stimulation is too much, and everyone is acting like I don’t exist. It’s me at the end of my rope.
What is a good mother? Maybe she’s patient. Maybe she doesn’t yell. Maybe she plays on the floor. Maybe her house isn’t a disaster. Maybe she cooks dinner. Maybe she enjoys her children enough. Maybe she doesn’t resent being needed. Maybe she breastfeeds. Maybe she doesn’t need a break quite so badly. Maybe she somehow gives three children what they need simultaneously without ever feeling like one of them is getting the leftovers.
The standards of motherhood can feel impossible because every mom (and even those who aren’t) has an opinion on every little thing. I have seen moms on social media argue over the most mundane things, as if a toddler going barefoot or a baby eating from a pouch is the most important decision a mom has to make. As if the decisions that a mom makes aren’t, in what she believes, the best interest of her own kids. And when there are so many choices to make, how do you decide what to compromise on?
We recently took dyes out of our kids’ diets, which luckily has not been too hard with the recent improvements from food corporations, but it’s still a change. Do I think moms who feed dyes aren’t “good moms”? Not at all. It’s just a change we decided to make.
But I do judge moms. Constantly.
It’s so hard not to when social media shoves decisions and questions in my face every time I open my phone. (I am working on less social media, but it’s hard when I am trying to grow BfB and need social media for that.) But yes, I judge the mom on social media who asks if 10 minutes is too long to let their 3 month old cry in the crib before responding, or whatever other thing I don’t agree with.
But it’s not a conscious judgment. It’s not a, “I am choosing to judge this person.” It’s a reaction that happens when I think of that baby crying by themselves in the crib. And there are other things, but it’s always an instant thing. I try and tell myself afterward that they are doing their best, and I don’t know their situation, and to try and be less judgmental, but the instant reactions happen.
I do draw the line at saying anything or leaving a comment. I really dislike when there are a whole slew of people commenting back, shaming. I don’t think that gets us anywhere.
I am sort of grateful for a lot of the challenges that I’ve been through with my children. There are quite a few times that I’ve joked with my husband that I’ve been given this challenge because I used to judge people for this.
Having children will humble you.
My first daughter was so easy. And she was an only child for almost 7 years. We rarely had to discipline her. She never once threw a tantrum. Not even through the “terrible 2’s” or when she was a “threenager.” She was amazing. Always listened. You told her no and she said, “OK.”
And I always thought, it’s because of the way we’re raising her. It’s because we co-slept, or it’s because we didn’t yell and didn’t spank, and I stayed home with her, and we explained things to her, and always told her we love her, or whatever thing I was doing that I thought meant I was a good mom.
How naïve I was.
Our second child has essentially wiped all of that out of my brain, and by the third one? I was cured of my judgment for most things.
I used to judge moms who said they didn’t make enough milk, until my third was struggling at the breast and my oversupply dwindled because she wasn’t nursing effectively. She would fall asleep almost immediately when at the breast. Then I had to start pumping to make sure she was getting enough, but I barely got enough for her each day, so we had to supplement with *gasp* formula.
Something I told myself I would never do again because “breast is best.”
I cried, and cried, and cried that I wasn’t making enough because I didn’t catch that she wasn’t actually eating soon enough to fix it. Of course, now I know that fed is best, even if breast milk is extraordinary. There are times when formula is lifesaving. Even if that reason is “just because.”
And then there’s my second daughter, the most beautifully defiant and strong-willed person I have ever met. Who is amazing in her own right. She throws tantrums that make people stare in the grocery store, she screams like she’s in a horror movie when the bath water touches her head, and she loves just as fiercely.
I wouldn’t change her for the world, but I have changed because of her.
I yell (regrettably), I use timeout weekly, and I feel at my wits’ end almost constantly. And we aren’t doing anything different than we did with the first. It is just a change in personality, and sometimes that’s the answer. And sometimes, there isn’t a magical “good mom” formula.
My children are loved and they are slightly spoiled. They eat healthy and get the ice cream at Culver’s. We have talks about the “whys” of things and they sit in timeout. All 3 of them have had some combination of formula and breast milk, and they are all perfect.
And wildly different.
The best part? I don’t believe I was as good a parent with my first child.
It makes me wonder how many of the things we judge other mothers for actually tell us anything about the kind of mother they are.
The complexities of human personality and emotion are far greater than the everyday choices we make as mothers. Maybe that’s one of the things it took me three very different children to understand. I can guide them, teach them, set boundaries, comfort them, apologize to them, and try again when I get it wrong. But I cannot parent three completely different human beings into behaving exactly the same way.
And their differences aren’t a report card on my motherhood.
Perhaps becoming less judgmental isn’t reaching some saintly point where you never have a negative thought about another parent’s choice. Maybe part of it is learning how unreliable our view from the outside actually is.
Having children has repeatedly turned me into a mother I once thought I understood from the outside.
Maybe a good mother isn’t a mother who always gets it right. Maybe she’s a mother who keeps paying attention to how she affects her children, repairs what she can, changes when she needs to – and keeps trying.
I will probably yell again. I hope I do it less. I will probably apologize again, promise to work on it again, and have another one of those ridiculous roundabout conversations where somehow everyone ends up comforting everyone.
I will keep getting things wrong.
But maybe the next time I catch myself whispering that I’m a mean mom, I can stop myself there.
I am not a perfect mother. I don’t think my children need one. I’m their mother. I love them, I am still learning them, and I am still trying.
Maybe that’s a pretty good place to start.
