The Perfect Mother

After 16 months at this motherhood thing, I’m beginning to realize there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. It exists in the realm of fairies and flying unicorns – that is, a nice notion but pretty much codswollop.

At first, I wanted to do it all. Be the perfect mom and even look the part. After day 1, I gave up on the looking bit, and I’m content to get through the day without once looking in the mirror because it was too depressing to face the crazy hair. But I still tried to get the rest of the mom stuff right. Most days, I would beat myself up trying to cook the meals, do the laundry, clean the house, sing the nursery rhymes, think of new activities to entertain the kids and make sure they’re relatively clean. It was like a never-ending cycle of things to be done.

These are the things they don’t teach you in school and what I managed to pick up from other moms are all the taboos like what not to do (most of which I’ve committed anyway). Like you can’t have dirt on the floor – what if your kid EATS THE DIRT? Or you can’t let your kid eat processed snacks or don’t let your baby cry.

All of which are good advice, no doubt, but I’ve come to realize that being a mom requires choosing your battles and letting go of the things that are of the least consequence. It’s called prioritizing.

So on any given day, I’ve got a thousand urgent things to do, like wash the mountain of clothes that threatens to fill up my kitchen and do the dishes and vacuum the floor, but in my list of mothering priorities, those are way down the list. Which is not to say that my kids live in a slum (I make the husband do the housework in the evenings) but given a choice between sweating the small stuff like cleanliness or playing with the kids, I pick the playing every time.

Sometimes I get surprise visitors and they get a shock because they think I was just robbed, but I’m totally cool with it.

Honestly, I would do it the same way all over again if I had the choice because Tru is absolutely delighted when I wheel him around the house in his little car for hours everyday or when I take him to the park. I could probably multitask but kids know when you’re distracted and Tru starts shouting and grabbing my face if he notices that I’m not paying undivided attention to the blocks he’s building.

Baby girl isn’t into the activities much but she loves being on my lap and listening to my Mother Goose rendition. So I guess what I’m trying to say is when you become a mother, your priorities become very different and you learn to live with things you never thought you would. Because when you end your day, you don’t think about how many dishes you washed but how your kid’s face lit up when you sat down beside them and sang silly songs.