The Secret, by Edie Landis                                
Pssst.  Wanna’ hear a secret?  It’s sure to make your day. Then come a little closer.  That’s it; now pay attention, because this is important.  Are you ready?  Here goes:  

There’s no such thing as a perfect mommy.

It’s true.  There’s not one perfect mom among us.  That beautiful actress who went to India to adopt a starving child isn’t perfect.  Your next door neighbor - - - you know, the one who makes her own baby food from scratch?  She’s not perfect either.  And neither is that mother you read about in the paper who potty trained every single one of her twenty children before their first birthday.

Listen, all of us moms have let our newborns cry for two minutes while we grabbed a quick shower, and all of us have forgotten to turn off the baby monitor in the kitchen so that visitors got to hear Daddy using the bathroom.  Not one of us moms holds the record for always remembering to grab the diaper bag on the way out of the house (or for that matter, always remembering to refill it.)

   
If you take a moment to think about it, I expect you’d realize that the majority of the mistakes we mothers make aren’t as big as they seem at the time.  I mean, it’s not like we’ve ever left our baby at home while we went on vacation, or forgot to change a diaper for days on end.  Okay, okay, so maybe we’ve put off emptying the Diaper Genie for a little too long, but a bad smell in the nursery isn’t likely to get us jail time, right?

 
Seriously, most women are pretty good at being her kid’s mom.  We make delicious and nutritious meals for our children, help them complete their homework assignments, take them on fun vacations, and keep plenty of pennies around for their gumball machines.  If that’s not being a good mom, I’m sure I don’t know what is.  So why aren’t we content with being a good mom?  Why do we think we have to be great?

 
Who thinks that?  Why, pretty much every mother who’s ever lived, that’s who.  Every last one of us thinks that we could be just a little bit better at mothering than we are, but why?  

Could it be because we focus too much on the stuff we don’t get done (or can’t get done) instead of on the things we actually accomplish?  Rather than concentrating on our achievements, like the fact that we read to our children every night before they go to sleep, and cut the crusts off their sandwiches and the skin off their apples, and stay up late packing their lunches or sewing costumes or baking birthday treats, and foster their imaginations with our time, energy, and various and sundry materials laying around the house just so they can turn a bunch of empty boxes into houses and grocery stores and spaceships (all while simultaneously holding down a job, and volunteering, and furthering our education,) we fuss at ourselves over our lapses and mistakes like how we missed another PTO meeting and didn’t finish cleaning the house.    

What kind of lunatic does that?  We mothers are the busiest, most amazingly productive creatures on the face of the earth, yet we’re getting mad at ourselves over a couple of missed meetings and dirty stairs?  And if that’s not bad enough we have this terrible inclination to make ourselves even more miserable by comparing ourselves with other mothers.

 
Come on now, you know what I’m talking about.  Don’t try to pretend you haven’t noticed Richard’s mom driving around in her brand new mini-van or Meg’s mom’s French manicure.  And how many times have you noticed that Joseph’s mom has such a cute figure, or that Trevor’s mom looks adorable in that exclusive haircut?  ‘Look at that,’ you think.  ‘There’s Amelia’s mom taking her daughter to the park again, and isn’t that R.J. and his mother with the mayor?  She sure does know all the important people in town, doesn’t she?’

 
Why, it’s almost as if we’re trying to give ourselves an inferiority complex!  If only we knew that R.J.’s mom is acquainted with all those VIP’s because her husband sells them drugs, and that Amelia’s mother spends a lot of time at the park to hide from an abusive boyfriend.  How very different we would feel if we knew that Trevor’s mom got that exclusive haircut to lift her spirits before starting chemotherapy, or that Joseph’s mom is thin because she suffers from an eating disorder.

 
Every mom has problems; not one of us is perfect (or has a perfect life.)  And no matter how old we get or how many children we raise we’ll never be perfect moms (or have perfect lives.)  How do I know?  I’ve been a mom for 20 years and while I’ve learned a lot in that time there are still some things I haven’t quite mastered.  For example, I continue to struggle over what to do when my 10-year old wakes ups with a headache and sore throat.  Should I keep him home or send him to school?  Commit to keeping him home and he’s sure to feel fine by 9 a.m.  Send him to school and the nurse is sure to call to report a vomiting fiasco.

So what’s a mom to do - - throw up her hands in surrender?  Hey . . . maybe that’s not such a bad idea?  Why yes, I believe that sounds like a plan!  What if we moms just quit agonizing over our decisions and learned to live with them?  And what if we stopped reflecting on our shortcomings and simply accept that they exist?  That sure would take the pressure off, don’t you think?  And once the pressure’s gone, so are all those nasty side-affects like feelings of guilt, and self-recrimination.  

Ahhh.  Blessed relief!  Why, it almost sounds too good to be true.  But then again, maybe you think it sounds like it’s worth a try.