Recently, there has been more and more discussion about what makes someone a good mother. Some circles say that you can only be a good parent if you feed your child an all organic vegetarian diet, never let them see a minute of television and make them read 100 pages of the Bible before bed. Others insist that you must carry your child on your hip 18 hours a day and allow them to breastfeed until they are ready to be finished, which is apparently high school by all accounts. A totally different camp believes that children are smart and can find their own way in life and we are just there to guide them.
Why are we all competing for the Mother-of-the-Year trophy? And who is voting on this? I'm pretty sure that my daughter is the only one who can say for sure how I'm doing as a parent and it will be quite a while before we know how she turns out.
Motherhood is like the clique in school where you always felt like you were on the outside looking in. You want to be one of those "perfect" moms but just won't ever have the right stroller or playgroup or feeding plan. What is funny is that even the moms that you are looking at and trying to emulate are a total mess. They have all the right answers on the outside but on the inside their life is a mess. They are suffering from a secret depression or their kids are flunking out of school or they are secretly eating Twinkies in the middle of the night after eating uber-healthy all day long. No one can maintain perfect. It is too exhausting.
Just wondering if you are good mother, makes you a good mother. That level of concern makes you aware of ways you can make your family better. All we can hope for is to make the best out of what we know because the "experts" will tell us once it is too late how wrong we were.
Why can't mothers just support each other and in some cases agree to disagree? We are all doing the best we can to raise our families. We work outside the home, we stay at home, we don't spank, we spank, we ban TV, we welcome it, the list goes on and on. Women are smart. We have helped to continue on the human species for millennium and since we are all here to debate this, we must have done a decent job.
Give each other a break and Happy Mother's Day!
P.S. The media could stand to give us a break for the week and stop contributing to the competitive nature of it all. We have enough to worry about without hearing about the Mommy Wars. I don't know that we would be "warring" if we weren't being told that we were.
Well put Christine, we can only be the Mommy we know how to be!!! You are a wonderful Mommy and I will take credit for it.....at least some of it anyway! ;-P
ReplyDeleteHappy Mother's Day to all....
Mom
Another excellent commentary Christine! I agree we should stop competing and just accept we all do things a little differently. Unless of course you find a mom who clearly shouldn't be one, like the ones who seriously neglect their kids, they should be turned into CPS. Otherwise, I say, stay out of my business!
ReplyDeleteI understand this is a Mothers Day themed post, and I know that a certain magazine cover helped precipitate this, but I have a question: is there such a thing as "The Daddy Wars?" Do fathers not care enough about the upbringing of their children? Do they not worry about their child's safety and welfare, or are they only concerned with teaching the arcane manly secrets of sports and tools? Perhaps they aren't "sensitive" enough to talk about their concerns or issues in a public forum, therefore not generating any debate or discussion about fathering methodology?
ReplyDeleteThe perceived notion that the Father is the secondary parent, I believe, is reinforced by the media, with their archaic gender stereotypes; the nurturing stay-at-home mother and the never-present type-A, nothing-but-business father. No, the fathers don't experience pregnancy and cannot breastfeed, but they are still concerned if they are spending enough time with their children, contemplate how much TV is too much, wonder if they should call the doctor about that scrape, and hope and pray that they are doing enough to provide for their children both physically and emotionally. I'm not trying to hijack your Mothers Day post, but as a father I frequently feel like I'm on the outside looking in.