Perfect Mothers Don’t Exist

Several books have come my way lately that all speak to the perfectionistic, impossible standards of modern motherhood: The Mommy Myth; Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juicebox; and Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. It makes me think of a comment a woman said to me at the grocery store: “I’m so tired of always trying to think of the right thing to say to my kids that I’m just going to say whatever I want and volunteer to pay for their therapy in eighteen years.”

When did Motherhood get to be so hard? When did being a good mother morph into being a perfect mother?

I was thinking about this last week, because of two incidents that made me feel like the world’s worst, most terrible mother: On Wednesday I missed my daughter’s guitar recital. I was five minutes late to the park, thinking that they were always running behind, and I’d be fine. But I just missed her performance. Then on Saturday, the police came to call. My family and I were sitting in the backyard after dinner, and my seven year old wanted to push the baby in the stroller on the street outside the fence. I said okay. Well, someone called the police, reporting a small child was pushing a smaller child in a stroller down the street, alone. The police appeared with a reprimand.

Now, if that doesn’t make you feel like you’re failing Motherhood 101, I don’t know what will. My husband told me to laugh about it. And then to write about it. Why? Because every mom has moments when she feels like the world’s worst mother. And if we share these moments, we relax. We understand that perfect mothers don’t exist; all mothers make mistakes.

In my early years of mothering, I was determined to do everything right. I educated myself about the ins and outs of parenting, read countless books, and approached parenthood with conscientiousness. But I did so with much internal pressure: I berated myself every time my behavior didn’t match my high expectations. I kept the perfectionistic standards that had helped me graduate from college with high honors, the standards that kept me on a perpetual diet to lose 15 pounds in my quest for the perfect body. I applied my impossible goals to my new role as a mother.