“You are a good mom even if you don’t always like being a mom.” When my first daughter, Lydia, was about 6 weeks old, we had a especially bad night. She wasn’t sick, but no amount of rocking, feeding, serenading, cuddling, or holding soothed her, and at that point my own sleep debt felt like a dead weight around my eyes. The next morning, I told my husband, “I love Lydia, but not enough to be her mother.” He stared at me in bewilderment and horror before I sent him on his way to work and told him I’d figure it out. I made some adjustments to my newborn’s schedule, and things improved pretty quickly, but I always try to encourage new moms that if they run into a similar moment, it does not mean they are a bad parent. It does not mean they don’t love their child. It does not mean they are not grateful for the gift they’ve been given. I am actually encouraged when I see other moms who don’t have it all together because it shows me I have company in my mess. If a fellow mom needs to tell someone, “I don’t like my child today” or “I’m not thrilled about being a parent right now,” I want to be a safe place for those words to land.
On the other hand, I need to bite my tongue if these kinds of words are on the tip of it:
Two things I’m going to tell other moms, like, NEVER
“Did you ever think about…?” A friend of mine was recently feeding her newly adopted daughter a bottle when another mom asked, “Did you ever think about breastfeeding?” My friend told her, “I did with my other three children” and left it at that. (She’s wise and self-controlled and nice that way.) I need to remind myself that I don’t know the details of another mom’s life. Maybe she can’t breastfeed. Maybe she’s impatient with her kids because her own mother is dying of cancer. Maybe she’s letting her daughter wear that to church because just getting her daughter to church in the first place required a miracle on par with the parting of The Red Sea and if her daughter is clothed at all, it’s good enough. If someone wants parenting advice from me, they’ll ask for it.
“It goes by so quickly.” When I was a young mom, older ladies would admire my babies and tell me sweetly, “Cherish every moment. It goes by in a minute.” Now that I am, well, not a young mom, I recognize the truth of their counsel. I look at my 16-year-old and think, “When did this happen?” But I also understand that when you’re in it, time does not pass quickly. When you’ve had 3 hours of disjointed semi-sleep (was that a cry?) and you haven’t had a shower and you really are not enjoying the stage of parenting you’re in and you cannot imagine getting out of it, time crawls. If I get the chance, I hope I’ll choose to to tell that new mom in the grocery store, “I know being a mom is so hard. But what you are doing is important. It matters. It makes a difference.” And then I might offer to buy her a coffee.
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