A love letter to all moms, everywhere

 In Motherhood, Self Acceptance

A love letter to all my mom friends out there (even the ones I don’t know, cause I’m certain we’d get along famously):

You are enough. Your parenting is enough. Your mom wins, your mom failures. The cheese pizza you have fed the children for three nights in a row. Your irritation at being asked to read “Everyone Poops” to your child for the 87th time, even though it makes her so, so happy and she laughs with abandon every time at the two-hump poop.

Your near constant compulsion to check Facebook or email during family time even when you don’t actually want to be doing so. Your lack of ability to breastfeed as well as you think you should or often enough or at all. Your resolution to let the baby cry it out or not cry it out. Your choice to let your own self cry it out or not cry it out, depending on your company, mood, and number of hours you slept last night.

Your lack of passion. Your abundance of passion about things that others find trivial because they just don’t get it. Your perceived inability to bond with your child or worry that you have bonded too much and she will never leave. Your uncertainty that you are the mom your child needs in terms of patience, humor, intelligence, eye color, pant size, shoe size, sheet folding skills, etc., etc. Your decision to skip bath time – for yourself or the kids – for the third night in a row.

Your impressive poker face when you drop your child off at daycare and tell them that he was sick but hasn’t thrown up in 24 hours, even though it’s been less than two. Your neurosis about those last 10 or 20 pounds that you are certain, in your darkest moments, somehow make you a bad mother and an even worse person.

Your anxiety that when you get frustrated with your children, they somehow believe that you don’t love them. Your panic that your son will be in therapy because of some random thing you did on a Wednesday when he was two-and-a-half. Your fear of telling people how lonely you are all day with your kid, even though your love for her is so big it overwhelms you at times. Your fear of increasing/scaling back your work hours because of what people will think.

Your occasional desire to quit your job and get paid to watch the Real Housewives or shop at Nordstrom or engage in some other trivial activity all day long. (Maybe this one is just me?)

Your near-constant concern that something bad will happen to your child and it will be all your fault. Because you will have caused it or prevented it from happening. Or some combination of the two.

Your fatigue at the end of the day and your feeling that while you are with your kids, you are rarely fully present.

That somehow, in so very many ways, you are not enough for them or yourself.

Your ongoing worry about them and all of this.

It’s just so much, isn’t it?

Friends – maybe, just for today, we could stop and recognize that if most (all) of us feel at least some of these things at least some of the time, then perhaps it is because these feelings are kinda, well…normal?

And if they’re normal, then we are faced with two choices: either we are all pathological beings who are hopelessly f’ed up OR we are doing okay after all.

I choose to believe the latter because I like sanity.

Maybe, just maybe, if we are all struggling with such thoughts, then we are somehow doing it right.

Maybe we are exactly what our children need. The parts we do well and the parts we don’t.

Instead of self-flagellation, maybe we can reach out to the mom next to us, no matter if she is doing things differently or the same, and say, “It’s a real bitch sometimes, this business of being responsible for another human being, isn’t it?”

And then maybe we can have some Diet Coke/tea/wine, share the most impressive and spectacular ways in which we fail, and call it a day.

In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be here. You know, catching up on Bravo, window shopping online at Nordstrom, and trying unsuccessfully to ignore my children. xo

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