Before I became a mother, like most people I'm sure, I had this idea of what type of mother I would be: this picture in my head of the things I might do, or not do, and how I would interact with my child.
I don't mean a vague notion of being a good mother, but rather a more specific future version of myself.
Maybe you have or have had these dreams too. Perhaps you imagined yourself as the type of mom who lost all the baby weight with ease, attended Mommy and Me yoga classes every week and jogged with your baby in an all-terrain stroller through town every day.
Or maybe you thought you'd be a crafty mom, baking homemade muffins and splattering paint across canvases with your kids in the backyard.
Or were you a high-powered business woman, in a suit and on the phone, but also pumping breast milk for your baby during a conference call? Or the super fashionable mom who looks like she stepped out of the pages of a magazine, your kids all in coordinating outfits, pushing your high- tech stroller holding your Starbucks coffee and shopping at the hippest boutiques?
I thought I was going to be one of those crunchy granola moms who breastfed everywhere, wore her baby in wrap, cloth diapered, and gave her kids healthy snacks like fruit and vegetables. I also thought I would be hiking with my kids all the time, even if I had to carry them on my back.
This dream version of myself as a mom was just that: a dream. And a stereotype-filled dream at that. It was simplistic, two-dimensional at best, and frankly, limiting.
To say my dream didn't come true would be accurate, but also not completely true.
I did breastfeed my children - not always as I had envisioned, but both my daughters received breast milk for at least a year or more. I did carry my babies, not always in a wrap, in fact more often in a semi-structured baby carrier, but not as frequently as I had intended to. I did cloth diaper but not during the newborn stage and not when we went on vacations. I did hike with my babies on my back but discovered it was exhausting and difficult and my postpartum depression left me unmotivated and overwhelmed about going out with my children.
Motherhood, as it turns out, is so much more complicated than the idea of being a mother I had in my head.
Before you have children, you think you can make so many choices ahead of time: bottle or breast, stroller or carrier, soother or no soother, organic, homemade food, or store bought baby food, and the list goes on and on. And we encourage women and all parents-to-be to make these choices as a society.
People will ask you what you plan to do: are you going to have them sleep in the same room as you? Are you going to stay at home or go back to work? Are you going to let them watch TV? Are you going to cloth diaper or use disposables?
What I have found as a mother is that sometimes all that planning I did in advance didn't really matter. All the reasons for my choices, and the reasons I thought they were the best choices, didn't matter when I was faced with a screaming, unhappy baby who needed the opposite of what I had planned, or at the very least needed me to attempt an alternative.
Now I understand how many things you will try and how many things you will do as a parent that you never thought you would. I know that we will all yell and lose our tempers at some point. I know that we will all be completely embarrassed by our children throwing a tantrum in a public place as we deal with it as best we can. I know that almost every parent had a lofty version of the parent they would be in their mind pre-children, just as I did, and I also recognize that we are all coping with the reality that we are not that parent we expected to be and that sometimes we feel incredibly guilty about our "failure."
I don't think it's a failure at all.
We are simply adapting and changing as parents to meet the needs of our children. Needs that we could not ever have predicted before we met our children. Needs that change over time. Needs that change from child to child.
So give yourself a break from the guilt, if you, like me still feel swamped in it from time to time.
We may never be that picture perfect mom we thought we would be, but then she was never a real person anyway. And she certainly wasn't taking care of a real baby.
But you are.
Every day you are out there solving the problems that parenthood throws your way and you are doing an incredible job.
