Seeing as this time of year is often referred to as awards season, let’s acknowledge that there is not an award for Mother of the Year. We might hear the term thrown around on the playground when a child is eating Cheetos out of the sandbox or on Facebook when a child chooses to fully express themselves in the Target line, but the reality is, there is no such award.
There isn’t an awards ceremony. There isn’t a red carpet. There aren’t any fashion police.
Because there is no such thing as a good mother. It’s a myth.
You should be letting out a huge sigh of relief.
That’s right. Let it all out.
Now you can get back to Instagram or whatever very important thing you were doing.
But before you do, let’s consider the mythology that we have created around a good mother, and then we can weigh in on how bat-shit cray cray it is.
The myth of the good mother:
When a woman becomes a vessel for life, she becomes a sacred temple in body and mind. She feeds herself foods lacking nitrates and protects herself from the perils of raw fish. Her skin glows with serenity because she in an embodiment of her destiny: motherhood. And because her body was created solely for this one purpose, she births a child into this world with grace and minimal liquids leaking from unexpected place. She swallows the F-bombs rising in her throat to prevent them from forever cursing her baby or its future.
After her baby is brought forth into this world, a mother radiates calm and confidence because of her sacred connection to her child. The milk flows from her breasts like the vodka drinks that once flowed from her glass. She sheds the skin of her past leaving behind any personal ambition or sense of self. She now exists solely for her child.
And as her child grows and thrives, because of her superior choices in diapering and sleep arrangements, the mother becomes warm and squishy yet also firm– not unlike a Toaster Strudel.
She remains unwashed. She does not put time or energy into herself because that would anger the parenting gods. She brings a sacrifice of mashed peas (I made this for you) and mascara (I gave this up for you) and places it on the altar that used to be her dresser but is now a changing table with storage area for diapers, wipes and various creams meant to be applied to bums.
A mother acts however necessary to make sure her child is receiving the best the world has to offer. She will trade her own organs on the black market for car seats with the highest safety rating. She will travel miles and miles to sing nonsensical songs while sitting in a circle. She will slay her own desires with swords dipped in the blood of little ponies or men who act like spiders. She will collect goldfish on her hands and knees.
A mother harnesses her creative spirit to craft a magical childhood. She weaves a dense tapestry on a loom of rainbows. She can not do this unless her love overflows on to each and every band. If the love does not flow according to the schedule taped on the refrigerator, all will be lost.
She will encounter many difficult choices and challenges but must face each moment with bravery and diligence. She is a rock that never trembles with fear or yells with frustration. She will ride the waves of her child’s whims into the shores of oblivion cultivating the patience that she grew in her garden right next to the organic mint she muddles into mojitos.
But a mother must also be supple showing great flexibility in body (diving to catch items before impact, wrestling children into car seats) and in spirit (on the days that snow falls from the sky, every other day of her existence).
Her quest will challenge her in ways that she could not have predicted. She will face demonic stomach viruses that rise from unknown depths. She will travel unrelenting mazes of homework that have never been solved. But she will prevail, because she is all things and can be all things to all of the people all of the time.
This is a mother.
No, this is a myth. A myth is tale of epic bull shit. A widely held but false belief or idea.
I’ll say it one more time, so you don’t forget: There is no such thing as a good mother.
There’s only you doing the best you can with the resources you have at any given moment. It’s not good. Or bad. It just is.
#tenyearsaparent is a weekly blog series about what I’ve learned in my first ten years as a parent. Whether you’re a parent nodding in agreement or shaking your head with disgust or a non-parent using these posts as birth control (the surgeon general wants me to tell you that reading blog posts about parenting is not an effective form of birth control), I’ll be spilling the beans on what parenting is really all about.
I am a fan of the “good enough” mother. Once I heard term the term it all made better sense to me. All you need to be is a “good enough” mother not the “good mother” as described in the myth.
I like that too. It’s so interesting to me how powerful the myth is, even though in our hearts and our heads we know it’s crazy.