Definition of a Good Mother (or Father)

I inadvertently hurt my friends feelings the other day. I said something that triggered inside of her the feeling that she's not a good enough mother. I've been thinking about it, and I believe I have arrived at a good measuring tool. It's really quite simple. If you feel, at any time, like you are not a good parent, that you are setting up your offspring for years of psychological deconditioning, that s/he is not well-fed/educated/trained/prepared for life, if you ever know, deep in your heart, that someone seriously fucked up when they let you walk out of the hospital with another human's life in your hands, then you are a good parent. If you were a bad parent, you wouldn't care. You wouldn't evolve. You wouldn't ever try to do better.

Here's how to reach that elusive bar of good parenting: don't. It's not even there. There are good days and others. The good days are drops of honey melting on your tongue. Savor them. When you don't have the patience or the listening ears or the intention of scrubbing the chocolate from the corner of the mouth remember everyone's been there and will be there again. That's life. That's parenthood. I'll never forget when my Phee-Phee was born. Satan's second in charge delivered her, the nurses were mean to me, they kicked Delta Hotel out then gave me a roommate in my private room and let her husband stay and fart on the pullout chair all night while I desperately tried to get Phee-Phee to latch on/sleep. I was a thousand pounds of pissed off when our pediatrician showed up the next morning. I INVENTED the phrase "poor me" that day. I even had a window facing the Human Soup pond. But in the midst of all that drama was a profound truth (I've found that those little nuggets are usually disguised in a pile of excrement). Our pediatrician sat down, put his hand on my shoulder, recognized my state of near breakdown and said, "All you have to do is love her. Do the best you can, and all the rest will fall into place. That's it."

Can you understand the freedom in that statement? Forget about the donuts for breakfast, the SpongueBob marathon, the nap on the couch when you could have been teaching your four year old advanced calculus/French. Forget whatever punishing standard your personal bar is raised to and just love your kid and do the best you can. The rest will fall into place.