If you're a parent you know her. If you teach or work with children, you may know her in the faces of those of us trying to BE her.
Perfect Mommy is well, perfect. She is well read in all the latest research. She never loses her temper. She never looks like she has been awake all night with a sick baby or smell faintly of sweet potato vomit even a week later. Her house is always clean. She may balance home and work with ease, or perhaps she is the pinnacle of the stay at home mom, home lined wall to wall with art projects and her toddlers first epic poem. She feeds her child only all organic healthy snacks, and most certainly never allows her child to have a cookie for lunch because he's been teething all day and it is literally ALL HE WILL EAT and oh my god you just want them to eat ANYTHING since there was a boycott at breakfast.
Perfect Mommy is a snipe. A red herring. She. Does. Not. Exist. But any new parent can tell you (because lets be honest, the pressure of Perfect Daddy is growing daily) that she is the enchanted mirror we hold ourselves up to every day. And she's destroying us slowly.
Some of Perfect Mommy's demands are not unreasonable. They're backed by science. Your child should eat healthy? No brainer. But here is where my dear friend science begins to get a bit like near sighted back seat driver. I am all about science. Science is cool and lets me put pictures of my cats all over the internet while I stream Raffi music instantly, as well as you know, help me live with an ill fated lay about thyroid. But sometimes science forgets that what works in a lab doesn't always translate to, well, life. There is what is ideal, and what is reality. Eating habits is a solid example. Not every meal can be a gold star standard, especially with toddlers who will survive on Mac N' Cheese one day, then entirely on carrots, then the next day air. Even before solids we battle with Perfect Mommy and her lab coated henchmen telling us what we're doing wrong.
I am a strong believer in breast feeding. I knew from the beginning I was going to do it. I even eye balled my sister in law for not being willing to even try it before going to the bottle for her baby. It's natural right? We were made with the equipment and supplies built in. It's natural, yes, but come naturally? I left the hospital after a few frustrating and a few awesome experiences with lactation consultants. My son latched well and it looked like we were going to be poster baby and mommy for the breastfeeding revival. Then I learned what an 'excited ineffective' feeder was and suddenly those moments my mom had described as bonding magic were hellacious. He screamed and got frustrated. So did I. I felt i was a crushing failure. I glorified my breasts, how could they fail me? My milk supply dropped from the ineffective nursing, and after some formula supplementation, my son quit both bottle and boob by his first year mark*. His weight, all the way until that mark when solids and cows took over, was a source of constant anxiety to me. At 19 months my son is in the 6th percentile for weight, after hovering barely in the 5th for months, perfectly healthy and a bottomless pit most days. He'll never be a big guy, his dad is 115 lbs, but I can't tell you how I silently celebrated that 1% climb when it happened. Those numbers were how I was measuring my success instead of his perfect cherubic frame and boisterous sponge like demeanor.
Perfect Mommy wields science so effectively, we find ourselves attacking instead of supporting one another. Like my looking down on my sister in law for not trying to breastfeed. TV is one of those demon topics we can use as easy ammo against each other to judge parenting skills. Science has proven TV is not great for your kids (or anybody really) and bans any more than a half an hour a day (or an hour, or 15 minutes, it changes regularly). But science has never had to console a feverish toddler with growing pains. They haven't needed that 15 minutes to an hour to wash the mountain of clothes/dishes/litterboxes/spilled milk/cereal/poop because the twenty minutes you got to yourself when your child was sleeping you oh-so-selfishly used to shower for the first time in three days. (Okay, a week) Should I let my kid watch TV all day? No sir, but don't come after me with torches because it slips to two hours because we've had a crappy day and I need to pay bills before my lights get turned off.
I beat myself up on a daily basis for a hundred little things that Perfect Mommy and our well meaning friend Science say I am doing wrong. I cry myself to sleep more often than I would like to admit. I spend too long gazing in the mirror and seeing all the things I am doing wrong by him.
So I say unto you fellow mommies, I am PROUD of you. Rock any day you can get that hard won victory, whether its finally sleeping through the night or getting your child to eat something green that didn't come out of a nose. Here's to getting that sink empty for at least an hour, and the thousand kisses, hugs, tickles and goofy noises you will bestow upon your little one to let them know they are Loved and Safe. Here's to doing our best with all our hearts and I really, truly hope you can shut out that Perfect Mommy with her done up hair and Mozart flash cards and see that your success in the face of your child every day. I hope science can be our guide, and not our standard.
I know that it won't be as easy as hoping, because even as I write this I am critically picking apart my day while my sweet son sleeps soundly. But we need to start saying it to each other, because while there are those parents out there who warrant Science's disproving glare, most of us are just doing our best to love our children completely, nurture them carefully, and not run screaming into the woods with out our pants.
*For the record, as frustrating as it was, I plan on breastfeeding when I have my second child too. Benefits won over hardships on this one for me.
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