I’m a “bad” mom. I’m also a good mom. That must apply to almost every mother out there, because we’re all human and we all have our strengths and weaknesses.
With my fifth Mother’s Day since I became a mom just in the rearview mirror, I’m thinking about whether I deserve to be celebrated. Just kidding. I know I deserve to be celebrated, but still, the impending holiday is making me look back on all the times I’ve done things wrong or gone against prevailing parenting advice. (So far, that is: My kids are 2 and 4; I’ve probably made about 1/100th of all the parenting mistakes I’ll ever make.) Sometimes I do the “wrong” thing because I know innately know what will and won’t work for my own kiddos, sometimes it’s because I’m trying to break generational cycles and that makes sticking to boundaries hard for me, and sometimes it’s just because the thing that’s considered best is really hard and I just don’t want to do it.
To celebrate myself and all the other imperfect moms out there on Mother’s Day, here’s a non-exhaustive list of the ways in which I’m a bad mom:
- I hated breastfeeding and fed my babies mostly formula. Breastfeeding hurt, it took too much time, it made me feel trapped, and it gave me anxiety that my babies weren’t getting enough food. I fed my firstborn a mix of breast milk and formula, then switched exclusively to formula when he turned four months old. My second-born got breast milk for about four days before turning exclusively to formula.
- I sleep trained both of my babies. Even though Instagram did its best to shame me into not letting them cry it out (who else has seen about 200 posts about how leaving a baby crying in a crib will give them abandonment issues for life?)
- Once my son moved from a crib into a big-boy bed, I slept with him every night for 2 years. He asked me to, so I did. It was easier to lie next to him than to spend an hour (or longer) trying to convince him to lie in his bed by himself.
- Now, I sleep with my daughter every night. Maybe she noticed from her big brother’s example that mom has no backbone, maybe she gets lonely in her big bed, maybe both. Whatever it is, now she won’t sleep unless I’m next to her.
- Sometimes I give my son a kid’s melatonin or my daughter half a kid’s melatonin if I can feel that they’re going to take forever to go to sleep. I do that because I want to lie in one of their beds and read my Kindle in peace.
- I let them watch TV right when they wake up, because I often do a Peloton ride first thing in the morning. If they wander out of their rooms while I’m on there, they get an iPad, some milk and a bowl of dry Cheerios.
- I let them watch TV right when they get home from daycare, too. Sometimes for a long time. And sometimes, on a rainy weekend day, they watch Frozen I, Frozen II and all the Frozen shorts.
- I have kept a secret from my children: They don’t know you’re supposed to put milk in cereal. I give them dry Cheerios because I don’t want to deal with drips of spilt milk all over the table and the floor.
- Sometimes I give them popsicles for breakfast. Usually I also give them something else, but if I know all they’re going to eat is a popsicle, that’s what they get.
- Sometimes I leave my kids playing or watching one of the Frozens in the living room and I go into my bedroom and eat candy so they won’t see me and insist on getting a piece of candy, too. If they yell “MOM, COME HERE NOW,” I stay in the bedroom until I’m done with my York Peppermint Patties.
- I’m bad at playing kid games. Every day, my son asks me to race him or play hide-and-seek or play the “puppy game,” whatever that is. And every day, I do it half heartedly for about half the time his little heart desires. My daughter always wants to be flipped upside down or tickled, and I just don’t do it because I don’t want to.
- I take my kids to the park, but I don’t come up with games for them to play there. I see other moms give their kids little challenges or set up obstacle courses for them. I stand there drinking a La Croix and making sure my kids don’t run into the street.
- I give into their insistent requests to get Happy Meals or go get four different flavors of “ice cream” at the self-serve frozen yogurt place all the time. That’s because I’d rather take them than listen to them beg and whine for a half hour.
- Sometimes I set a boundary but don’t enforce it because I want to do the thing I’m threatening to take away. A few weeks ago, I told my son that if he pushed his sister one more time, we weren’t going to take the ferry across the water to get ice cream, as planned. He pushed his sister. We went on the ferry to get ice cream anyway, because I wanted to.
But I’m a good mom, too. My kids may eat infant formula and fast-food chicken nuggets and popsicles, but that’s not all they eat–and they’re always fed. They may have cried in their cribs until they fell asleep as babies and they may need their mom next to them to fall asleep now, but they sleep. My kids may watch more TV than is recommended, but watching TV is letting their mom have me-time to fill up her patience tank for the day. I may be bad at playing kid games and coming up with park games, but they play and they go to the park every day. When my daughter falls at the playground, she cries “mommy!” and rests her head on my shoulder until she calms down (unless daddy is there, too–then she runs to him because his shoulder is better). When I say “I love you” to my son while I’m lying in his bed, he rolls his eyes and says, “I know. Stop telling me that.”
Happy Mother’s Day to all the good bad moms out there. I see you.