A Good Mom

 **Disclamer: I wrote this last February :) **

           I'm not sure why I thought motherhood would turn me into a Martha Stewart clone.  Believe me, there’s nothing in my pre-kid life to suggest this would be true.  I was a girl who did homework at the last possible second, and that girl grew into a woman who puts off really cleaning her house until company’s coming, and then runs around frantically shoving things into drawers and lighting scented candles to disguise the general untidiness.  I’m a big fan of sleeping late, taking long baths, and reading really thick novels with a hot cup of tea.  If relaxation were an Olympic sport, I wouldn’t necessarily go for the gold, but you can bet I’d be standing on that bronze platform without breaking a sweat. 

            
For some reason I thought motherhood would change this, and it in many ways it has.  A child forces some semblance of a routine.  You can’t stay up watching Grey’s Anatomy on DVD until four in the morning anymore, not if you’re going to make it to Lil’ Kicks Soccer class on time the next morning.  Motherhood comes with an unending checklist of tasks: You have to wake up, you have to make breakfast, you have to get to preschool before the “Who’s Here Today” circle time song. 

            
  But even though I’m a different person than I was before my son, I’m just never going to be the kind of mom who has color-coded bins in her house.  I think I’m allergic to them, or something.  I’ve learned that that’s all right, that there are a lot of ways to be a great mom, and good enough is good enough.   For the most part.

              
The exception to all this yay motherhood, I’m-okay-you’re-okay business would be the holidays.  Not just Christmas, but any holiday.  For some reason, my latent domestic goddess genes kick into high gear and I become obsessed with recipes, crafts, and well shot photos of my child in seasonal garb.  Don’t ask me why, I can’t for the life of me explain it. 

             
Take Valentine’s Day, for instance.  I had two parties to prepare for, one for my son’s preschool and one for his daycare.  Now, the easy thing to do would have been to run to Target and grab a box of cheap Valentines, maybe some heart stickers if I was feeling really fancy.  But alas, the logical part of my brain (the part that knows me and has an accurate grasp of my skills) shut down completely at the word “party.”  My mind became awhirl with visions of my son (dressed in a holiday-appropriate-but-not-trying-too-hard red baseball style ringer shirt) bearing adorable, home-made cards or snacks.  But what? A heart-shaped, hand print butterfly with the caption “Just fluttering by to wish you a happy Valentine’s day?  (I should mention here that during these episodes of holiday mania, I also don’t realize severe cheesiness when I see it.  My apologies.)  I debated this for a while before realizing that getting my squirmy three year old to paint that many butterflies had a slim-to-none chance at happening.  And roping my husband, lovely though he may be, into using his work printer to furtively make glossy color copies of our son’s artwork (again) was probably not a good idea either.

            
  I finally decided…to Put Something in a Cup.  This is a holiday motto of mine.  When all else fails (and given my delusions of grandeur, it often does) I rely on Putting Things in Cups.  Really, it works! Buy small, seasonally appropriate items, put them in a mug, and wrap, using massive amounts of cellophane and pretty ribbon.  Easy, pretty, and loved by all.  (I think.  I suppose all previous recipients of Things in Cups could have been lying out of pity.)

             
Anyway, on my Valentine shopping trip I managed to find 5-packs of red plastic tumblers with hearts. Perfect! I gave myself a mental high five.                

 I decided to put snack mix in them.  My mother-in-law has a great recipe involving cereal (I could use whole grains! The other parents would love it!), white chocolate, Craisins (Red, so as to fit the theme!), and M&Ms (I can get the Valentine bags with only red, white, and pink! My holiday saturated mind thrilled at the thought.)

             
 Except…there were no Valentine M&M’s. (Did I mention, um, this shopping trip took place the day before Valentine’s day? I know, I know.)  I had a mild panic in the Target candy aisle.  My husband didn’t understand why regular M&M’s wouldn’t do, or failing that, why I couldn’t just “buy a bunch and pick out the red ones.”  It is a testament to my craziness at this point that I actually considered this, before realizing there weren’t enough bags of regular M&Ms if I only used one color.

           
   By the time we got home, it was late.  I washed the cups and began melting the chocolate.  So far, so good.  Except that when I dumped it all together, it formed a gooey, unappetizing mess.  “Maybe it has to…set up for a bit, or something,” I told my husband.  “It’ll be fine.  I’ll just leave it overnight and dump it into the cups in the morning.”

              
You can see it coming, can’t you? These things never end well.  Somehow, it always ends up with me in a frenzy twenty minutes before I’m supposed to leave the house.  In this case, I was frantically jabbing at the enormous, hardened rock of snack mix with a spoon in an attempt to break it into manageable chunks and begging my husband to cut cellophane rectangles and find out where our son hid the ribbon (Tied in a knot around his plastic cow’s neck, as it turned out.  Apparently “don’t touch this” translates into three year old language as “please take this semi-expensive red and pink polka-dotted ribbon upstairs and turn it into a lasso.”) And when I say “rock”, I do mean “rock.”  That chunk of snack mix could have cut diamonds, I swear! It was a calcified mess of M&Ms and Chex. (I can neither confirm nor deny that I had to bang it on the countertop several times to break it into pieces.)

             
But I managed it. I pulled it off.  I got to work on time and spent the morning feeling like I’d accomplished something. Those cups of hardened snack mix, the effort I put into them, said something about what a good parent I was...didn’t they?

             
Well.  If I were being totally honest, I know that my kiddo would have been just as happy-maybe more so- to bring in flimsy Scooby Doo valentines.  If I were being totally honest, I’d admit that I was just trying to keep up with ”her”.  You know, her.  That mom whose kids look like BabyGap ads and never seem to have tantrums.  That mom who always has good hair.  (What is with that? Where does she find the time?)   The mom who does have color coded bins in her house and actually knows what’s in them.  The mom who doesn’t still fit into her maternity pants and never yells at her children.  I’m willing to bet, if you’re a mom right now, you know exactly who I’m talking about.

              
The thing is, though, when I think about it, I realize that she doesn’t even really exist. (Okay, maybe the kid in my son’s preschool who handed out heart-shaped cookies with each student’s name perfectly written in frosting has a mom who comes close, but that’s it.)  She’s just something I’ve made up, some mythical mommy who’s a mix of expectations I’ve set for myself and TV parents who never put a foot wrong.  Every mom I know personally is struggling, at least a little.  The moms I know who work feel guilty because they’re not at home, and the moms I know who stay at home feel guilty because they  can’t, or don’t want to, “do it all.”  I know a mom who says she feels like “the Big Bad Wolf,” because she’s strict with and expects good manners from her daughter, and I know a mom who says, “they walk all over me, but it’s working for now,” about her two boys because she takes an easy-going approach to discipline.  Motherhood is one of my very favorite things about my life right now, but I have to admit sometimes it feels like a no-win situation.

So, we might all be in this together. It might be okay to admit that I don’t have everything figured out, that probably no one does. Probably everyone has their frantic moments when they find themselves slamming a boulder of snack mix onto the counter. (Well…maybe not that exact scenario.) Probably the fact that we all love our kids and want to do the best we can for them is all right.  Wonderful, even. So maybe I can cut myself a break.

Until St. Patrick’s Day, anyway. I saw a recipe for the most adorable leprechaun cupcakes…