I love my mom. I want to say that I really love my mom. She is the ‘stuff’ that ‘good mothers’ are made of. She is kind, selfless, patient, honest, and unconditionally loving. She is a prime example of what the man above may have had in mind when he created mothers. To say that my mother is among my dearest friends is one of the truest statements I could make.
When I was a child I thought my mother was perfect, or almost. She rarely seemed to have a bad day. He could find the silver lining in almost any situation. She loved my dad, and she even kissed him in the kitchen from time to time. And, yes, although I pretended to be completely horrified by my parents’ “PDA”, I secretly loved it.
Because of my mother’s excellent example, I believed that motherhood would be relatively easy. Although I knew I would have my moments, I was sure there would be plenty of moments that resembled a Hallmark greeting card or a Lifetime Television movie. I thought that love for my son would come instantly and would rarely be put to the test. I believed that I would be able to selflessly give to my children just as my mother had done. In my imagination, I would still be able to do almost everything I had done in the past in terms of housework, meal preparation, and daily personal care. Then I had a son.
When my husband and I brought our son home from the hospital (after an unplanned emergency C-section), I remember sitting on the couch and looking at him as he sat in his infant seat. She looked at me as if to say, “Who are you?” and I looked at it the same way. Though I knew quite a bit about this little person who had grown inside of me over the last few months, there was much I didn’t know, and a barrage of questions flooded my mind like the gust of a tidal wave. What if she cried? Wasn’t I supposed to know what her screams meant? Why wouldn’t she “stick” to breastfeeding? I thought that babies are born with the sucking reflex. Why don’t you sleep… at all? Why does he keep looking at me like I’m a stranger and when was the last time I brushed my teeth?
I remember feeling tremendously disappointed in myself because each day brought new discoveries of things I didn’t know. I believed that she was failing as a mother and I knew that I was doing my firstborn great harm. How did my mother do it? In fact, she was asking me, how did any mother do it? Finally, I swallowed my pride and shared my concerns with my mother. OK, I cried and she listened. She was waiting for me to tell me that I was missing several important concepts, or that I was so wrong that I needed to seek professional help. Instead, the experienced mother sitting across from me offered me nothing but reassurance and encouragement. She said a lot of things, but what I remember most is that she told me that my son didn’t know more about being a baby than I did about being a mother, and that we both learned every day. She also reminded me that it is often through our mistakes that we learn the most. Today I pass on that information to my fellow parents, no matter how experienced they may be.
Parenting doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and even if it did, the manual probably isn’t “one size fits all.” Every parent is different. Every baby is different. Just when we think we’ve figured out parenthood, we either have another child that’s completely different, or our child shows us something else we don’t know.
In short, perfection in parenting is in the eye of the beholder, and as viewers we would be doing ourselves a huge favor if we took a serious break. As parents we will make mistakes. There will be times when we will wonder why we did or said what we did. We may lose our temper, have selfish moments, or even long for our pre-parenting days. However, the positive side of all this is that each new day brings a clean slate and a new opportunity to teach and learn from our children. After all, even though our children have never been babies before, they really do a good job. If they can do it, so can we!
