Mother’s Day is meant to be a celebration, but for many it feels like an evaluation.
Am I doing this right? Did I choose the right style of motherhood? Have my lifestyle choices ruined my kids forever?
Any mother is familiar with that nagging feeling of imperfection. So this year, I want to offer something different. Let me tell you about three mothers I know.
The first is a stay-at-home mom in every traditional sense of the word. Her kids come home to freshly baked bread. Neighborhood children fill her house after school. She’s a room mom, PTA member and seemingly endlessly available. She often wonders if she is doing enough.
The second has a demanding career. She travels frequently, relies on childcare and answers emails late at night. She occasionally takes work calls on family vacations. Kids’ lunches are prepared in haste. She constantly negotiates how to be fully committed at work and also present at home.
The third works part time from home. She is usually close enough to hand over a Band-Aid or run forgotten homework to school, but when kids walk through the door she’s often tucked away in another room working. She tries to balance two roles, sometimes feeling she doesn’t do either one well.
I’ve been all three mothers.
I have three sons, and each had a different version of me. A mom at a different professional stage, with a different schedule, different pressures and different limitations. But each of my sons had a good mom. A mom who paid attention, created meaningful opportunities, was sometimes distracted. A mom who showed up in the ways she could.
My love for my children has been constant and steady no matter my season of life, and I haven’t been more committed in one season than another. But life changed, and our family adapted.
My sons’ qualities, strengths and challenges cannot be tracked based on which mom they had. There isn’t a road map to show why my children have turned out the way they did. I can’t point to one and say, “He’s like this because I stayed home.” Through different childhoods, they each had access to experiences and resources that allowed them to grow and thrive.
We’ve created categories of mothers — stay-at-home mom, working mom, somewhere-in-between mom — and we layer judgment and assume we understand every situation.
I see constant discussion online and with friends where women wonder if they made the right decision. Should I have worked? Should I have stayed home?
We’ve created categories of mothers — stay-at-home mom, working mom, somewhere-in-between mom — and we layer judgment and assume we understand every situation. Any amount of time observing the “mom influencer” world shows women who take the moral high ground for choosing to stay at home as well as working moms who claim superiority for having more independence.
I refuse to get caught up in the world of passing judgment, and I find most women are tired of the comparison. I love seeing mothers eager to support other mothers in different circumstances. When I stayed fully at home, I made efforts to be a place where my working mom friends could bring their kids in a crunch. I’m grateful others do that for me now.
My life and my faith have taught time again that mothers matter. Fathers matter. Families matter. But there is room within that truth for a wide range of lived experiences. You will make good decisions when they are made in the interest of the entire family, including yourself.
This Mother’s Day, let go of the guilt of wondering if you’ve somehow ruined your children because of the type of motherhood you’ve lived. There is no version of motherhood that eliminates tradeoffs and no one path that leads to raising good children.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to defend whichever version of motherhood I was currently living and started trusting that I was allowed to adapt. My life and my family could change without it meaning I had failed some ideal. This made me a better mother in all seasons.