Often when interviewed, I'm asked what kind of a mother I am. That's a lot like asking me to make up my own test and grade it myself. Who knows? I showed up for it. I worked a lot of overtime. Had a lot of help from Drs. Spock, Denton and Ruth. Not one of my kids is working on a "Mommie" book. (Only one has an agent.)
I suspect that if you talked with each of the three you would get a different answer because I was three different people. No one got the same mother.Child No. 1 got the Antiseptic Queen, a thin, nervous woman endowed with patience and dedicated to staying at home boiling things all day long, as if she were living through a typhoid epidemic. She boiled pacifiers, toys and diapers, recorded the baby's BMs and took pictures every four days for the baby album. She hand-smocked little dresses, served homemade baby food in a warmer dish with little ducks floating around the rim and actually needlepointed a 4-by-6 rug of a sailboat for the nursery.
Child No. 2 got Super Sufferer, who had stretch marks on her face from overeating and dragged around in her husband's shirts. She couldn't get a meal together until 7 and fell asleep during a root canal. With regularity, she flunked the wife/mother quizzes in magazines. She told her children the tooth fairy resorted to checks because the IRS needed proof of the deductions. Apathy reigned. The baby food included a hot dog on a paper plate. The musical potty seat played "The Impossible Dream," and she once rescued the pacifier from the coffee grounds and rinsed it with the garden hose before sticking it in baby's mouth.
Child No. 3 got Mother Mellow, who didn't much care what he did just so long as he had clean hands and his own door key. Birth and graduation pictures were on the same film. The sailboat rug faded when it was washed and was now used for a dog bed. She was a woman with no nervous system even when the baby bit into a tube of paint tint and urinated blue for a week. This mother actually revealed a sense of humor and admitted to mistakes from time to time. She ironed on demand and just the parts that showed. The only items in the baby book were a footprint and congratulations from the insurance agent.
Small wonder kiss-and-tell books are written by the first-born.