I have a confession to make: I have been guilty of projecting a parental perfection upon my fellow mothers. I see pictures of their well-kept homes or of their cleanly clad children and think of the dirt stains that ever reside on the front of my son’s clothing with mild shame. I catch glimpses of their planned menus, three square meals a day, and I loathe the number of evenings I am too willing to order out. I shrink in the shadow of these perfect parents. I know they are but apparitions, images created in my personal moments of self-doubt however, my mind engages in the exercise all the same. My tendency to do such may stem from my minor compunction at leaving my children wrapped up in their pajamas long into the day. Or it may gain momentum from those moments wherein the volume of my voice is too loud or the tone of my correction too sharp. Or it may even be connected to my resistance to cooking sit-down dinners for cooking is not a labor of love. Wherever from these thoughts arise, it is a serious personal problem, one wherein I project my own feelings of ineptitude in the form of fake perfection onto the faces of fellow mothers.
Motherhood is a time in a woman’s life wherein the sisterhood of fellow mothers is essential to the balance of the chaotic sort of sanity that surrounds child rearing. Thus, it is strange to engage in such self-sabotage. It certainly does not take away from the joys of my children nor do I shy away from the challenges of love, patience, and faith that inherently accompany motherhood. However, the isolation it creates is confounding and down right unfair to myself and my sisterhood of mothers. I know I am not alone in the subtle practice of self deprecation and I am willing to bet that there is no more fertile ground for self doubt than that of motherhood, for we are entrusted with these children of ours through some Powerfully-Divine-Direction and the thought of failure looms greater here than in any other endeavor. I am even willing to surmise that other mothers may project an unrealistic perfection upon me, believing that I skate through the everyday moors of motherhood with grace. They do not live in my head, nor do I reside in theirs. Thus, again we remain relatively estranged from one another.
This morning I am saved from this cycle of my own mind’s merciless musings by the blog of a friend who writes her own confessions about motherhood. She confesses to days of resistance, to the occasional shout, and to the endless exhaustion of it all. Though not without exalting the blessedness of motherhood, she relays in her words the same struggles I face. She alludes to that familiar uncertainty about which I write now. She reveals hints of her perceived shortcomings and in her words I hear myself. And in her words, I find inspiration. Let me clarify, for it is not the inspiration to parent better. After all, as my husband points out when I go on and on about these wicked thoughts of mine, our children are bursting with intelligence and confidence; they are loved and loving and this truth is the saving grace that propels me forward in my darkest moments of personal insecurity. I know we have great children and I know we are great parents. I am inspired by her admissions to quiet that dubious self-talk. I am moved to burn the effigy of perfection that haunts me. I am reinvigorated to reinvent that perfect vision of motherhood within my mind to embody the imperfections that unite us, that make us human, and that makes us each, in our own right, perfect mothers.
