Embrace the Mom You Already Are

I want to thank all of you mothers who have been following our challenge these past two months.

Life is tough and I don’t anticipate that parenting will get any easier over the next years. We feel more pressure to make our kids happy, more pressure to keep up with our friends and more pressure to perform as Moms and women. Most of us have an image in our minds of what we look like as the “perfect Mom” to our kids. That image, I am convinced, is the very thing that gets us in trouble. As long as she- the mother that we should be– stares at us from the front of our minds, we can’t win. The mother in my own mind is calm, kind, patient, able to run a marathon (even though I can only run 3 miles on a good day), makes teal table settings like Martha Stewart does, whips together meals from Bon Appetit at 5:45 pm and well, sits and chats pleasantly at the end of the day with my husband. Hmm. How did this woman come to be?

As we look forward to Easter, let us be reminded that there is only one mother in each of our lives and she is reading this. There is no room for two. So let’s do to her what Dorothy did to the Wicked Witch of the West. Grab a big pail of water and throw it on her. Make her melt into the kitchen floor. Then will we be able to love and embrace the one true mother who is left. The real you and the real me. We who are left are more than good enough.

The truth is, no one needs teal placemats, to be able to run a marathon or to make every word we speak to our kids count. Being the Mom that we are is good enough for our kids.

So let’s embrace the cracked, frazzled Mom that we are and be just a little kinder to her. Buy her a cappuccino today. After all, she needs it. She’s a little tired.