I am definitely not the best wife, and no one has nominated me for 'Mother of the Year.'
Don't worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.
There isn't a clear-cut way to be a parent. We will all make mistakes.
I always remind my kids, "I'm your parent, but I'm a human being, too, so I may not be perfect."
I learned a lot from my Mom. My favorite lesson: remember there is no such thing as a certain way to parent and to remember that you are learning along with your child - it's ok to make mistakes.
I have been tossing around the idea of writing some non-fiction. Maybe a collection of short stories about my experience being a mom and how not to be perfect.
Not everyone's a perfect parent, but we do learn, and we grow from that. I'm not trying to be harsh on my family because it does make them sad to think back about how they used to be and some of their choices.
I'm certainly not a perfect mother, but I am an avid mother, let me put it that way.
I've been the type of father who tries desperately to be perfect but doesn't succeed all the time.
I'm certainly not a perfect mother, but I'm trying to be what my mother wasn't for me. My mother's battled depression, so I understand it now as a parent, some of the things that she must have been going through.
Younger kids, they understand that things aren't so perfect with their father or with their mother.
I want to speak directly to the audience, to say, 'I'm like you - I'm frustrated, I'm not an expert, I don't have a manual on parenting, I make mistakes, I'm selfish too.'
My parents were not perfect, but no one's parents are. As childhoods go, mine was pretty comfortable and good in a lot of ways, and yet I still ended up with anxiety.
Yep, my daddy was an undependable drunk. But he'd never missed any of my organized games, concerts, plays, or picnics. He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could. (189)
There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.
Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, "Great. Maybe you can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.
The mistakes that I made I made because I drank too much. I don't think that's going to happen any more. Am I going to make mistakes as a parent? Sadly, every day. I'm looking around for the perfect parent and I haven't seen one yet.
We come from fallible parents who were kids once, who decided to have kids and who had to learn how to be parents. Faults are made and damage is done, whether it's conscious or not. Everyone's got their own 'stuff,' their own issues, and their own anger at Mom and Dad. That is what family is. Family is almost naturally dysfunctional.
We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.
How well we understand the kids' world is very important, and I myself am not claiming to be the perfect dad, and from feedbacks from Jo, I understand that more time should be spent with our children.
Trying to be Supermom is as futile as trying to be Perfect Mom. Not going to happen.
Moms are people, too. Moms make mistakes, too.
You have to have a certain kind of thickening of the hide. I mean, I'm not particularly worried about what other people think. If other people think that I was not the world's most perfect mother, they are completely right.
I found out that I'm a pretty bad father. I make a lot of mistakes and I don't know what I'm doing. But my kids love me. Go figure.
I always tried to do things by example, even though I was not a very good mother regarding routines and family life.
