You Don’t Have To Be Perfect To Be A Great Mom

Are you the new mom in survival mode who hasn’t slept in weeks and can barely hold it together?  The new (or seasoned) mom sitting in the support group crying because it’s the one place you feel safe to express how you feel?  Are you the mom of the toddler who is having a total meltdown in the middle of Target with everyone staring? Or maybe you are the mom chasing her child as he runs out of the library while you are trying to check out his picture books for the week.  Sound familiar?  Guess what…. I have been in each of those exact situations.   It’s OK.  You don’t have to be perfect or have the perfect child to be a great mom!

In many ways our society is very quick to judge and most of the time… we are judged unfairly.  Mom guilt is no joke either!  If you are like me, you know that no matter what you do or how hard you try, it often feels like your best isn’t good enough.  I often feel like I am failing my child.  But guess what?  Your best IS good enough and you ARE doing a good job even when you think you are barely holding it together.  Yes, I know it’s much easier said than done and even I have a hard time taking my own advice which is why I decided to write this post.  Here are some of the situations that I have personally found myself in.  I hope that you can relate and that they make you feel better about your own parenting skills!  It wasn’t easy for me to decide to write this post and share my “mom fails” with you so please don’t judge (but go ahead and laugh)… after all… we’ve all been there right?

When my son was a newborn I was the new mom crying in group because I was stressed out, lonely, tired, and dealing with a family who wasn’t exactly thrilled that I had chosen to breastfeed.  I was using a nipple shield which made me feel like a failure.  Many of the breastfeeding books and websites that I had read up on while pregnant had highly discourage the use of a shield but it was the only way that I could get my newborn to latch.  In addition to that, my newborn was not the stereotypical screaming newborn who constantly wanted to eat. Instead, he was very sleepy.  I actually had to set alarms to remind myself to wake him up every two hours and more or less convince him that he was hungry.  To make matters worse, because he was completely able to tune everything around him out (including blaring music and sirens that would make anyone else cringe) and just sleep away, my family started questioning his ability to hear.  For the record… he hears just fine thank you very much!  (And before you get too jealous – he did turn into the hungry, hungry, cluster nursing infant a couple of months later).  To top it off, we were on the “weight probation” program for months.  It felt like I was constantly trying to wake him to feed (which was very difficult) and then he would nurse for over 30 to 45 minutes each time.  What I call the “long and skinny” gene runs in my family (although I did not get it much to my disappointment).  No matter how hard I tried or how much I nursed my son, he never had the “Michelin man” rolls that the other babies in my support group had.

While it was very hard to see in the moment, what I perceived as barely surviving, failing, and at times even drowning, was actually me being a good mom!  I was doing my best and giving my son everything I had.  Does this sound familiar?  Have you been in my shoes?  You’re not alone!  And crying in a support group? Well, the ladies in mine will tell you that is pretty much a rite of passage.

When my son was about two months old I took him to a picnic playdate in the park to meet some moms from my support group.  I desperately needed friends and I wanted to make a good impression.  Well…. I’d say that I successfully made an impression but it wasn’t the impression that I had hoped for!  After we had eaten and chatted for a few minutes… my charming son decided to poop – of course!  No big deal – or so I thought…. As I was changing him he decided to poop again – explosively.  It went EVERYWHERE.  It covered my clothes, his clothes, the blanket I was sitting on, literally EVERYTHING.  I was stunned and utterly mortified.  To make matters worse, as I futilely tried to wipe up the mess and save face I realized that I didn’t have enough wipes with me to even remotely clean up the hazmat zone my son had just created.  Newbie mistake! I wanted to disappear.  I was beyond embarrassed.  Lucky for me, the other moms had been there before too and took pity on me giving me some of their wipes to clean up the mess and helping me clean up what we could.  Needless to say, our picnic abruptly ended after that.  I’ll never forget how those ladies made me feel OK.  Humiliated as I was they made sure to tell me that it was OK and made a point of inviting me to the next outing when I was so sure that I would never be asked again.  I am forever grateful.  However, I have to admit that after that day I never left home without at least half a package of wipes (or two) in the diaper bag.

When my son was around 7 months old my husband was out of town for business and my co-sleeping baby managed to fall out of the bed.  Yep, and to be brutally honest?  It wasn’t the only or last time that it happened.  I’m not proud of this and at the time I totally freaked out but he was fine.  Around the same time when my husband was out of town yet again, my son fell out of the pack and play.  He was just beginning to learn how to sit up and to my knowledge couldn’t do it on his own yet and as so, we were still using the raised pack and play bed.  We were still working on baby proofing our living room and I didn’t trust my cord chewing baby alone but I also needed to get some laundry done.  Anyone else been there?  So while I ran down to my basement to check the laundry I laid my son in the pack and play – a place that I THOUGHT was a safe zone.  As I was transferring the wet clothes into the dryer I do recall hearing a large bang but I also have very loud neighbors so such a noise wasn’t out of the ordinary.  What WAS out the ordinary was where I found my son when I came back up from the basement.  I opened the basement door and there was my son… sitting on his puzzle mat playing with his toys – happy as could be.  I did a double take.  When he saw me… he smirked a little and then started to cry.  It was as if he was crying to make me feel bad and confirm what had happened.  I had caught him playing as if nothing had happened though and if I wasn’t 100% sure of where I had left him I might have thought I was dreaming it all!  I was horrified.  I immediately texted a few friends to talk me off the ledge.  I couldn’t believe what had happened.  My son was clearly fine but I felt so bad that I hadn’t protected him well enough – that I had put him in a position where he had the opportunity to get hurt!  On the other hand, when I called my husband in panic mode – he told me to put the kid back in to see how he got out!  Yeah… I so was not going to put him back in after that.  One fall was enough!  But as bad as I felt then, you know what?  Accidents happen and luckily my son was OK.  You do what you have to do and you do it with the best info you have at the time.  I thought the raised pack and play was OK. After that I knew we needed to lower it.  My son’s fall doesn’t make me a bad mom… it makes me human.  If you’ve been in my shoes, give yourself a break.  You are still doing a good job.

When my son was one I let him watch TV for almost an entire day one day. Yes, I know that screen time isn’t recommended before age 2 and if you do let them watch it, you are supposed to limit it.  But you know what?  I didn’t feel well, my husband was out of town, my toddler was losing his mind, and I was at the end of my rope.  I made the decision to let my son watch TV to save my sanity and to make him happy.  He went from running around screeching to smiling and dancing to the music on the show he was watching.   I felt a ton of guilt over the amount of screen time that I allowed him but the reality was that the TV was a better option than both of us being miserable and me yelling at him begging him to please cooperate.  Survival mode is OK!  In my opinion sometimes you have to go with the “lesser evil” and sometimes my sanity and relationship with my son is more important than a day of extra screen time.  I’m sure we have made up for it on other days when we have been out and about having fun and doing activities from breakfast until bedtime.

My son is now 20 months old and this is how a recent trip to the grocery store went.  I made the mistake of letting my son ride in the cart.  I normally carry him in a baby carrier – not because he can’t sit in the cart but because as much as I love my son, he’s not trustworthy – AT ALL.  I was tired and decided to let him try the cart because I plain just didn’t feel like lugging him through the store.  When we entered the store I felt a surge of confidence.  There was a basket of free fruit for kids and they happened to have bananas – my son’s favorite.  I peeled the fruit halfway and handed it to my son who could hardly wait.  “This will keep him busy for at least a few aisles!” I thought to myself.  WRONG.  I had barely made it 5 feet from the door and my son had already inhaled the exposed half of the banana and was angrily trying to eat the peel.  When I tried to take it from him to finish peeling it he screamed “NO” and threw what can only be described as a very loud tantrum.  Everyone was staring at me trying to negotiate with the screaming toddler.  All I needed to do was finish peeling the banana so he could finish eating it and stop the hysterics’ but he wouldn’t give it to me.  The longer he screamed, the dirtier the looks got.  Didn’t they know that I wanted him to stop too?  That I wasn’t enjoying his meltdown either?  Eventually I wrestled the darn banana out of his hand, peeled, and gave it back to him but it only lasted about another minute.  My son then informed me that he was still hungry.  He did not appreciate being told that he had to wait.  While looking at strawberries, I glanced at him only to see that he had pulled the shopping cart cover off of the cart and was licking the cart handle.  Talk about gross!  I took a deep breath.  In the next aisle over I found a coupon dispenser and handed him a coupon to keep him busy.  He ate that too.  Then he took a box of cereal from the cart while I was picking out coffee and tried to eat the box.  I fished a pacifier out of my pocket and gave him that praying it would keep him busy and quiet.  Shortly after I realized it was no longer in his mouth.  When I asked him where it was he pointed behind me.  I found it on the floor two aisles back.  So much for that idea!  During the remainder of the shopping trip my toddler consumed: a cookie from the bakery sample tray, ¾ of a bagel that I was buying, a piece of turkey from the deli, and a piece of cheese from the deli.  By the time I reached the checkout I was on my last straw.  As I was put items on the conveyor belt my son kept trying to take them off and eat them.  I thought I was going to lose my mind.  “Oooh he’s soooo cute!” the woman checking me out cooed.  “Cute?” I thought.  “Terrorist” is more like it!  I felt embarrassed by my son’s antics but I was doing the best I could and sometimes that’s all you can do.

OK – so my kid can be a major pain in the butt and his antics and my response to them often make me feel like a failure, a bad mom.  My friends have helped me realize that the fact that I care, that I try to correct his behavior, that I am teaching him manners, and that I do feel embarrassed are all indicators that I really am a GOOD mom.  I’m a mom doing the best I can for my son every day.  Some days are better than others but at the end of each day every day, my son knows that he is safe, he is loved, and he is happy.  Those are the three most important things in my book.  So let’s all cut each other and ourselves a little slack.  Instead of judging a mom who is having a difficult day why not offer a helping hand instead of staring or even just a reassuring smile. If you are the struggling mom, take a deep breath and know that your best IS good enough.  We all make mistakes but we do the best we can with the information and circumstances that we find ourselves in.  Somehow all of our children will make it to adulthood.  In the words of Jill Churchill, “There’s no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.”

Sometimes life is letting your toddler sit in the laundry basket while you fold the clean clothes