Source: David Castillo Dominici
This mama is going on a bit of a break this holiday season, but don’t fret! In between some of the new content, I’m revisiting some of my most popular posts for the newbies to our community. This piece was originally published February 2011.
It’s a question I used to ask myself all the time. Why did other mothers seem so much better at anticipating their kids’ needs? Keeping their cool when their little ones were throwing a tantrum? Why couldn’t I…?
It’s a dumb question. They’re all dumb questions.
We all fall into our groove in this motherhood thing at our own pace. It’s normal.
You know that warm feeling that’s supposed to wash over you when you first see your baby?
Didn’t happen for me.
Not with the first kid. Not with the second.
I kind of looked at them, in awe, like, “Wow, dang, I made him/her.” But the feeling definitely wasn’t love. It was curiosity…and fear.
So when I hear moms gush about how much they loved their babies from the first moment they laid eyes on them, yeah, it made me feel just a teeny bit inadequate.
When I cried out from sleep exhaustion and raw nipples and postpartum depression (common among young moms, by the way) in the first few months, I wanted relief. I wanted someone to watch my kids, for a day, a week, a month, until I could recover and feel like “me.”
So when I hear moms talk about how their babies were SUCH great sleepers and breastfeeding was easy and motherhood is the greatest thing to ever happen to them and they feel that way every day, well, it made me feel inadequate.
When I was working a full-time job because I thought it was the best way to provide financial security to my family, I secretly wished I was at home with my kids, spending much more than the two hours a day I got to see them before they went to bed. So the chorus stay-at-home moms seemed to sing (“Your kids need more love than money!”) made me feel…you got it, inadequate.
I’m four years in on this motherhood thing and I’ve finally stopped comparing my experiences. All I know is I’m being the best mother I know how to be (and I’m in graduate school to learn more). And I work HARD.
Being the best mother I know how to be? It takes work. I am not a nurturer by nature. I don’t get off on people calling my name 40 times a minute and having 43 different requests by the time I’ve got my eyes open fully in the morning. I’m a loner in the biggest sense of the word. But every day I serve as their mother, I get better.
So I write this to tell you: Stop comparing yourself to other mothers. You have your own set of circumstances that dictates why you do things the way you do. You know what matters most to you and your family. You are not inadequate. You are more than capable of being everything your family needs. Period.