The Mother I Should Be
This picture is making the rounds in my social media lately and I wish so badly that I could internalize the message behind it.

Instead, ever since my son was born in 2017, I have been internalizing all of this:
As a mother I should have boundless energy. Maybe I would have if I’d had my child 5 or 10 years earlier, which of course I should have, even though I wasn’t in the right place in life and then when I was, it was hard to get pregnant.
Or maybe I would have that boundless energy if I didn’t also work full-time in a demanding job (the demands of which are not at all equivalent to the paycheck, but that’s another issue). In fact, as a mother, I probably shouldn’t be working a demanding job at all. I should be working, of course, as that it is necessary for being a good role model and I’m a feminist after all, but I should somehow have a magical flexible job like my mother who worked weekend nights to be home during the days or just nights in general — three long twelves to earn the shift differential so she could be home. In any case, I certainly shouldn’t be so burnt out in the evenings and on the weekends that playing with my child — reading him the same book over and over and over — feels like a chore. I should be enjoying the cuddles when he’s home sick, not thinking about the emails accruing in my inbox, or even worse, trying to answer the emails one-handed on my phone.
As a mother I should have endless patience. I should be capable of finding ways to get him to eat his dinner rather than losing it after an hour of him playing with his food. I should not be frustrated by the aforementioned book read in an endless loop. I should have a bunch of imaginary games up my sleeve because when I do come up with something like building a fort for his stuffies — “You can read your book in there, buddy. Like, to yourself.” — it is only going to last for five minutes. Maybe it would last longer if I were a creative wizard like those Pinterest/Instagram Toddler Moms who tell me I should be doing stuff like making sensory bins and letting my kid play with flour despite the diabetic cat who will eat it and then puke and then I will be cleaning up flour and cat puke. There are thousands of creative things to do with toddlers that I am either A. not thinking of; B. not creative enough to enact; C. would require things I don’t have and should I really order more shit from Amazon? Didn’t I do enough of that in the middle of the night during the newborn phase?; or D. would be messy beyond my personal limits of messy, which as a good mother I shouldn’t have because I should just deal with the mess and not limit my child’s expression and besides I should be teaching him to help clean, but as an exhausted mother who feels more stressed when her house is a wreck, sorry, but I have some fucking limits. Usually the answer to this is E. all of the above. And I call myself a creative person. Fail.
As a mother I should read to my child. This I excel at. He asks regularly if we are going to the library. I keep trying to get him to read Winnie the Pooh or Harry Potter or something more engaging for me than that damn Elmo book or Dinosaur Underpants book or Maisy book. We’ll get there eventually, right?
But I can’t rely just on books, we need to go out and do stuff. We should go outside more. I should find more fun places to take him. We’ve been on one real hike since he was born. One. It was pre-sleep training when the magic of getting him to sleep in the car was part of the appeal rather than the enormous sacrifice it is now. If he naps in the car, that means I lose those 2 blissful hours of quiet, kid-free time where I can get shit done. Like the shit that has to get done to keep a household with two working parents afloat. The cooking and meal prep for the week. The endless loads of laundry. I should be willing to sacrifice this, though. I should be spontaneous and willing to throw everything out the window. All the logistics, which now that we are potty training include, “Has he pooped yet? Is it safe to leave the house if he hasn’t pooped?” But fuck the poop timing and the sleep timing and whether or not laundry gets done and dinner gets made. It shouldn’t matter that Saturday mornings we need to go grocery shopping and on Sunday we have swimming lessons. I should be making this work. We should be doing something new every weekend. Or at least going to the museums where we have memberships more than twice a year. I should be making time to read that book I bought about activities to do with kids outdoors year-round. I should be reading Parent Map for ideas, not just picking it up and leaving it on the counter. I should be researching things to do rather than just relying on them to pop up on my Facebook feed. I should be doing this planning during those naps, my lunch breaks, whatever.
I should be raising my white middle class kid who was born male not to be a racist, sexist, homophobic asshole. This I am definitely committed to and truly frustrated that I haven’t had the energy to put into learning more about or doing more than making sure his books and toys represent the diversity of his world. I am doing my best to do my own anti-racist work so that as he grow older, I can speak honestly and candidly. He will be going to his neighborhood school, and I will figure out somehow by the time he is school-age, a way to work less so I can be involved and part of the community. I am glad that we have lucked into daycare situations where his role models and most beloved teachers have been a Black woman and a Latino man. But while I may have been being sort of sarcastic in the stuff above (though the guilt behind the sarcasm is very real), I am not doing as much as I want to here. I have deep admiration for my cousin who takes her kids to volunteer in their community regularly. I don’t know how she does it, but I should figure it out. I want my kid to take care of other humans and of the earth and we need to do more of that.
My main desire is for my kid to be kind and sometimes he is, but more often than not, he’s a jerk. Not like the kind of jerk that adults are, but still a jerk. I should not think he is a jerk, though, and I should also not let him be a jerk. I should know, just know how to reason with my toddler, how to prevent temper tantrums or stop them. I shouldn’t ever yell. I shouldn’t be pushed to the point of crying myself. I should be able to beautifully execute the tips I read in the parenting books I have read — and I haven’t read enough and I didn’t start reading them early enough like while I was pregnant or while I was trying — rather than feeling like I am failing a test 95% of the time unless it happens to be one of those days where my patience level is higher than normal and my exhaustion level is lower. I should always be consistent with how I reason with my toddler. I should decide ahead of time what things I am going to hold firm on. I should pick a lane, never mind the fact that it feels like that are people shouting at me that I picked the wrong lane. I’ve traumatized him for life, certainly, by sleep-training him. Even though at the time I was sleep-training him, I was beating myself up for not quite doing it right, not getting there fast enough. Even though now that is the one thing that is not a battle. There are some stall tactics and he will rarely sleep past 6:30 am, but he will go the fuck to sleep.
Food though… the dinner time battles. It’s an endless reminder of how I could never quite do it right. I breastfed, but the first few months were painful, stressful, and awful. At nine months, I had to start supplementing with formula, which I blamed myself for. If I wasn’t working. If I wasn’t so stressed and depressed, my supply wouldn’t have tanked. I probably introduced solids too early. I have wondered since the moment he was on the outside: “Is he getting enough? Is he getting the right thing?” And I was so focused on breastfeeding, which I didn’t read enough about during pregnancy apparently, that then I didn’t read ahead on solids and toddler food battles. ALWAYS READ AHEAD, STEPHANIE. YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS. You should have made time for this, gawd. So I never quite picked a lane on the whole “baby-led weaning” thing. I mostly offered less spicy versions of what we were eating, but only if he wouldn’t choke on it. I quickly gave up any notions of making my own baby food even though my mother did this. I bought pouches and hated myself for the environmental impact (just like the disposable diapers because I could not find the time to work and mother and clean diapers and bottles and pump equipment). Eventually we made smoothies and he eats them from reusable pouches for breakfast. This is how I weaned him when I decided that after almost two years of being the very first person to see my child in the morning (it should be an honor and a privilege, I know), I was done spending twenty minutes nursing him before I’d even had coffee. I transitioned him to these pouches with animals on them. That right now it seems like he will still be eating in college. Meanwhile nearly every non-pouch meal (meaning second breakfast, lunch, and dinner) is a battle. Usually it involves me putting the thing we made — the thing we are eating, but blander — on his plate and him playing with it. If I am very lucky, he will eventually put it in his mouth and declare it “Yummy.” Even in this scenario, he will usually decide after several more bites that it is no longer yummy or that he only wants one part of it (the sweet part because I ruined him by not introducing only vegetables at first or whatever). He will throw or remove the part he doesn’t want from the plate — usually the vegetable that he liked yesterday or last week or at the beginning of the meal. I will grit my teeth, I will beg him to eat a little bit more until we’ve reached a point where we can call a truce. Then he will push his plate away and say “Berries,” which in his mind is dessert for now… or at least it was until Halloween because now he says, “Treat.” I will provide the requested treat and that meal will be mostly a success. The failed meals are when he will only eat a bite or two and then say that he wants a burrito or cheese or berries or “treat. “And I will say no. I will beg him to taste his food. And sometimes if he does, I tell myself that one thing I read said now I should give him something he will eat but doesn’t like too much (not a pouch, cheese is borderline, PB&J is preferred), so I do that. Sometimes we battle though. Because I don’t have the thing he wants. Because he only wants that one thing. Because he has been a jerk all fucking day/week and now we are in a total battle of wills. Because I am a bad mom who has not done enough reading on negotiating with toddlers (or whether you negotiate with them because you don’t negotiate with terrorists, right?) and cannot pick a lane or make a decision.
My indecision is ruining my kid. My inability to be consistent or to control other things so they can be consistent. Like daycare. Daycare has been a battle this entire time. I couldn’t even find the first one until a month before I went back to work, even though I’d started when I was 10 weeks pregnant. I had to set the bar of: “Has a spot, doesn’t cost more than I am making at work, is licensed, will keep my kid safe, healthy, and reasonably happy.” Some people have the goal of Montessori or languages or other bells and whistles. I literally said to my partner when we toured the daycare we started with, “If she is not an axe murder, I am writing her a check to hold a spot.” And so I did. And I went back to work. I left my kid with a stranger when he was 3 months old and I regularly wondered if I would get a call that he died of SIDS. Not because he was neglected, but because he was young and vulnerable and not with me.
I tell people now that if I had it to do over again — and if I’d had a more flexible job where I could cut back hours, but also magically make a lot more money so I could afford this — I would have done a nanny or a nanny share for at least that first year. Just to have one-on-one care while we figured out the sleep thing. To avoid a winter full of colds and ear infections that seemed especially brutal because my baby was still exactly that — a baby. Six months old in January. I loved our first daycare provider. We had our issues — sleep, providing enough breastmilk — and then she ultimately decided to become a preschool and we had to move our son to a new daycare. This one has languages and is Montessori-inspired, but that was just lucky. It also has a lot of turnover. I can’t ask them to provide soy milk instead of cow’s milk just because I think cow’s milk is gross and unnecessary and causes stomach upset. I’ve had to stop worrying whether they are feeding him vegetarian or not. I’ve sacrificed many of the things I told myself I wouldn’t and I feel not just like a terrible mother, but a terrible person.
And now we are potty training, which was mostly going fine at home, but not at daycare. Because they are inconsistent. Because they can’t work with him more individually as he needs to be worked with on this. Or at least they didn’t until we finally he said, he is coming here without pull-ups next week. The first day we tried it, he peed through 4 pairs of pants, and when I picked him up, he was in wet pants. I gritted my teeth and stayed the course despite feeling like a terrible mother who let her child pee everywhere and sit in his own urine. Ever since then, the accidents have been rare. Daycare has learned and he has learned. But I still think, if I were a good mother, I would have taken a month off and just worked through this with him. Or I would have been more discerning in my daycare search. Or… Or…
I blame myself for the indecision. I blame myself for the inconsistency. I blame myself for my depression. I will forever wonder if I fucked him up, if he will be insecurely attached in some way because I was so deeply depressed in the first year of his life and it was untreated. And yet, I also feel guilty about the treatment. Like meds mean weakness. I shouldn’t need Zoloft if I was strong enough, if I was able to balance my life in other ways, if I had realistic expectations of motherhood and life and made different choices — these are things I have heard people say about medication…
So where does this all come from? Why have I internalized it so deeply? How can I be kinder to myself because deep down, I know I am a good mom. I know I have my strengths and I know that my weaknesses make me human and will teach important lessons about mistakes and repair and being adaptable.
I wrote this for my therapist, by the way. I didn’t read it to her. I told her it was a rant. That it came out sarcastic and maybe kind of funny. That intellectually I knew all the “shoulds” are impossible societal (double) standards. That being a working mother is a catch-22, a double-edged sword, a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t. That I am set up for failure.
And yet I still blame myself. I still set impossible expectations for myself and feel like shit when I don’t meet them.
I wish I could say that my therapist provided a magic and instantaneous fix, but it was just the beginning of a conversation — one that I will probably be having for the rest of my life. We did talk about my mother and those twelve-hour night shifts she worked in order to be home with my brother and I when we were younger. How I know now that she was exhausted, but that’s not what I remember from childhood. I remember that she was there and she loved me and at nights when she worked, she made tape-recordings of herself reading to us. I also remember that we fought. I remember that she and my dad didn’t totally get me all the time, that sometimes I felt let down, but that I also know that they did the best they could with what they had.
“Is that the takeaway here?” I asked. “That even if we do our best, we can’t be perfect and we will fail.”
She encouraged me to stop using the word failed. “Try ‘shaped’ not ‘failed.’”
My child will be shaped by my efforts. I will do my best and when he needs something different, together we will reshape.
