For the first ten years or so of my career as a mother, I felt really good about myself. My kids were always a mess, but the good kind that screams, “I had fun today!” We’d spend hours at the children’s museum exploring the magic of bubbles, or creating shaving cream art. We’d have wild dance parties stomping with the dinosaurs or marching around the living room in our rain boots. Mothering was fun, and I just couldn’t get enough of it—I suppose that’s how I wound up with four kids.
I won’t say that mothering was the first thing that I felt successful with, but it was the first thing that I was truly passionate about. I dedicated a good deal of time to researching the responsibilities of my job—from the pros and cons of vaccinating to the best method of schooling or unschooling my children, and eventually went on to get certified as a doula, lactation consultant, and natural childbirth educator. In other words, mothering became my life.
I wish I could say that I was able to be one of those compassionate mothers who just felt good enough about herself to never resort to looking down on others. But that would be a lie. I often found myself wondering why some women chose to parent certain ways when it was obvious that those choices weren’t what was best for baby—because my ways were. I knew this because I had done so much research and reading to make sure that I made all the proper choices. To consider that alternative ways of parenting were equally acceptable would have undermined my hard work. And so I judged.
Of course I wasn’t the only one judging. I felt the searing gazes of neighbors’ eyes sizing me up as well. They thought my house wasn’t clean enough—or my yard or car either for that matter—generally because activities like shaving cream art and bubble mania didn’t only take place at the museum. One woman even had the gall to say so one day: “I give you credit Erin. I could never live like this.” But I didn’t care. Their critiques didn’t bother me because I knew I was a good mom. Their houses were cleaner, but their kids were also in daycare while they stayed home flipping through J. Crew catalogues and Good Housekeeping magazines all day. I guess in fairness they didn’t do that all day—maybe just from 10 am (right after cleaning up the breakfast dishes and wiping down the counters) until 2 (just in time for a quick Martha Stewart home-beautification project before pick-up). So I accepted their negative assessments, and happily, unabashedly took equal measure of their faults as mothers.
It’s not to say that I didn’t make mistakes; have kids fall off the playset when I wasn’t looking—I did. And there were definitely times where my kids came home from the beach way too sunburned, even blistering, from too much sun and not enough screen. There was even one time where we took my son to the hospital because he woke up in the morning looking like Caillou—the cartoon character with a really big head—due to sun poisoning. We even called him that a few times, much to his dismay. We had just shaved his head after a major bout of “ukus” (the local term for head lice) and a few hours of tropical sun on a freshly exposed scalp left him pretty well seared. As the ER doctor explained to us, even though he didn’t look super red or blistered, the sun exposure to such bare skin was enough to cause fluid build-up which caused the alien-like appearance. Lesson learned.
So I’ve made my share of mothering mistakes, but none of those mistakes in the past seemed quite bad enough for me to criticize myself too harshly. I could always take a step back and say, “You’re doing just fine—Keep up the good work!” But things are different now. Two years ago my youngest son was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes, at the age of fifteen months. Where I had once been accustomed to functioning as the role-model in so many mommy support groups, sharing my knowledge on breastfeeding, baby-wearing, co-sleeping, and cloth diapering, I suddenly found myself in a swirling, mixed-up world of terminology, formulas, and survival-mode strategies. All of a sudden I had gone from being the person who was asked to help fix problems and share my secrets-to-success to being the one reaching out to others; often begging for help in the middle of the night when I had finally given up hope of figuring out solutions on my own. Somehow the diagnosis of this disease for my littlest one turned me from feeling like mommy-guru to mommy-failure in an instant.
I started crying a lot more (to my parents many mornings before I would leave for work, or to my colleagues when the day had gotten off to an especially rough start). I still cry a lot—and not always because of diabetes. Sometimes I just feel so overwhelmed by life that I don’t know what else to do. Not too long ago I had a mommy-mishap that probably wouldn’t have fazed me a few years ago. Or maybe it wouldn’t have even happened in the first place. I forgot my daughter’s swim meet. We were supposed to be at the pool at seven in the morning for warm-ups. At eight-forty, while I was sitting sipping coffee and working at my computer, my mom called to ask what time she should meet us. “Meet us where?” I asked. And just like that—like a scene in a movie where images just start rushing by at warp speed—I realized what I’d done. I yelled for my daughter (who I’d let sleep in), rushed the kids into the car, and snagged everything I could think to grab in that instant and raced her off to the pool. We squeaked in, just before nine—only to find out that she’d been scratched. From everything. Coach looked at us with a sad kind of look on his face and just said, “I’m sorry. I thought you guys weren’t coming.” And so I cried. I started blubbering something on his shoulder (yes, I’m a grown woman who cries on her daughter’s swim coach’s shoulder) and told him how overwhelmed I’d been feeling and how I just didn’t know how to make it all work anymore. He grabbed me by the arms and looked me in the eyes and said, “Let’s fix this!” and took off running. The man actually ran across three pool decks on our account to fix my mistake. The officials said they couldn’t determine if they’d be able to get her back in any events until the full schedules were printed up, but promised to help in any way they could. Half an hour later we were told she’d be in two—What a relief! I cried.
The good thing about failure is that it’s humbling. I tend not to judge other mothers quite so much anymore. Ok—I do judge mothers who give their toddlers soda. Especially in a baby bottle. I have a seriously hard time not screaming in my head about that one. But I work really hard to take a moment and remind myself that I have no idea what the circumstances are of the snapshot I am seeing. Maybe the child is diabetic too and needs a fast sugar source to avoid a severe blood sugar crash. Maybe not. Probably not. But I keep reminding myself that I just don’t know.
As I sat recovering on the pool deck at my daughter’s nearly-missed meet, I settled my little one down with a bag of Doritos—at ten in the morning. He was just calming down from a fall into the twelve-foot deep-end of the pool (on my watch) and his sugar was crashing from an overdose of insulin I had given him shortly before. Doritos were the least of my gaffes at that moment. Artificially-colored chips loaded with preservatives may be a poor mid-morning snack choice for a toddler, but in that instance, I was literally using them to save my son’s life. Thank you to the kind woman who gave them to us as I had forgotten to pack his snacks in our mad dash out the door that morning. Hopefully no one was judging me.
