Best Mom Contest

I have been very careful to not say, "When I'm a Mom, I will always..." or "When I'm a Mom, I will never..." because I had enough sense to know that huge generalizations don't have a great success rate. For example, I really wanted to have a natural, drug-free labor and childbirth. Until, of course, I was actually in labor. To be fair, I was induced with Pitocin and made it until about two hours before delivering, before my husband (who I had thrown up on and told pretty intensely that 'we are not talking during contractions anymore') and the nursing staff convinced me to get the epidural when I was vomiting in pain and my BP reached 180/110. I knew another person who said she was "devastated" that she couldn't deliver drug-free. I, on the other hand, had the nursing staff cracking up when I said, "What is this crap about the joy of natural childbirth? I'm getting one of these EVERY time I have a baby!" But nagging at the back of my head was the thought that maybe I could have made it without the drugs. That maybe I would have been a better mom if I would have.

And let's just be honest fellow Moms - we don't exactly make it easy on each other. For example, my daughter wears cloth diapers, so I am by default a better mom than anyone whose child is in disposables. ;-) I'm totally joking, but isn't that what it feels like sometimes? One mom says, "I breastfed my child for a year" and another mom chimes in and says, "Oh, that's nice... I did two years... like the World Health Organization recommends." And then another mom is like, "Oh, you might have seen me on the cover of Time magazine breastfeeding my kid before his little league game." It makes sense then why everything seems like a contest.



My mom was a young mom, and I know she felt a ton of the pressures of being a good mom and doing things just so. One of her best friends was an older Mom, though her daughter was the same age as MacKenzie - her name is Paula, and she is seriously one of the coolest people ever. Paula and my mom led MacKenzie and Kate's Girl Scout troop, and when my mom would fret over this or that, Paula would smile and say, "Our only job in raising kids is to make well-adjusted adults." Paula always encouraged Kate to dream big. Kate was always incredibly creative, sometimes not fully dressed when it might have been appropriate, and told people in Kindergarten that when she grew up, her goal was to "be Chinese." Everyone laughed, but now Kate is studying Asian Studies in college and has done semesters abroad in Asia and Europe. She's a pretty darn well-adjusted adult! I try to remember Paula's mantra and take being a Mom both terribly seriously and not seriously at all... at the same time. In the Best Mom Contest... let's all help each other win.

At the end of the day, it's all pretty petty. I read this awesome, awesome blog awhile back about how moms should stop nit-picking each other over silly personal choices and look out for children who ACTUALLY do not have loving and caring parents in their lives. It was beautifully written and a great reminder that cloth-diapered, disposable-diapered, breastfed, formula-fed, epidural, natural labor... we're all doing the best we can, and at the end of the day all we can do is try our best and be a Godly example for our children.