The Perfect Mother
I remember being pregnant with my first and read blogs of parenting and believe I will be perfect just as the depicted posts showed. I forgot, that blog posts glean only on bits and pieces of the lives of people!
I remember myself being quite smug that I was near perfect with G. There were a few things you know, but in the grand scheme of things I was a perfect mum. I was also the rebel mum, because I knew no one else who breastfed, wore their child, cloth diapered and co-slept! It made me smug more then ever!!
Then came baby number 2 and the perfect mother was shattered into a million pieces. I remember pouring into books and more blogs to try understand what went wrong and how I am to right it but nothing worked!
And at that point we can despair and see ourselves as failing. But the mothering journey does not, cannot, stop that day; even though we feel we cannot continue. And it is in overcoming these moments that we find ourselves as the mothers we truly are. In these moments we have to let the perfect mother die, and embrace our quirky, impatient, silly, messy, deeply loving mother selves.
Pearce, Lucy H.. Moods of Motherhood: the inner journey of mothering . Womancraft Publishing. Kindle Edition.
It actually took years for me to let go of the perfect mother. It took years of tears and frustration to understand that the perfect mother does not exist even if it is pushed upon us in society.
In those years since, I started gathering my wisdom. I re-learnt what being a mother actually means and though I have been a mother for 10 years now, I am not an expert. I will never be an expert – at least not in the way society expects me to be.
I am a mother, struggling with the rest of you. I am a mother who has built up her wisdom bank and from it can show you some tricks that HELP to keep the chaos to the minimum; the craziness contained. I will not teach you to be good parents – because you already are! I can not teach you how to change habits – only you can do that willfully. What I can do is show you how messy being a mother is, how to right it and keep it real for your children so the bar for them isn’t unreachable but doable when their time comes to be parents.
The journey of motherhood is never ending. Our children show us our faults through spotlights so we can heal and change and embrace motherhood in all its mess and in all its glory.
