Ah-Ha! We All Suck!

After my last post about my parental neglect and failure to compile and produce a baby book for one of my children, I was pleasantly surprised to read the few comments posted that made me realize that I am not the only bad mom.  Many of you didn't do baby books for your children either.  And some of you never even considered it!  We all suck!  I feel so normal!  Thank you!  We can deprive our children of their earliest accomplishments and feats together.  And the best part about that is that if none of our children have Super Mom's who make them baby books, then they won't even know that it was an option!  Win-Win!  Genius!

The funny thing about that whole self driven guilt trip I created for myself about the stupid baby book is that I stopped and thought for a minute about why I even cared.  After all, it's just a book.  Is it life altering if CJ knows how old he was when he first slept through the night or when he learned to play Patty-Cake?  No!  So I came to the conclusion that I felt guilty because I had a Super Mom who made me a baby book so I just thought that it was what I was suppose to do.  In my mind it was the mom's job to keep track of and document their baby's life.  But why?  Why does this responsibility get stuck with the mother?  Well, who else cares about us and loves us enough to write down things like, when we took our first steps or what songs we sang as a 2-year-old or how old we were when we finally went pee-pee in the potty?  Nobody!  And who besides a mother would find it sentimentally necessary to keep a chunk of hair from our first haircut and tape it into our baby book so that someday, 30 years down the road, we could look back and see our baby hair?  As I write that down it sounds not only creepy but a bit unsanitary.  And yet I have chunks of hair floating around in boxes that I saved from my own kids.  Weird!  It's a morbid twisted kind of love I guess.

With Mother's Day coming up shortly I guess I just want to give a shout out to all moms.  Regardless of whether you keep baby books for your kids or save their nasty haircuts, or whether your a working mom or a stay-at-home mom, you're a mom!  And that in itself is amazing!  Every mom shines at something and every mom sucks at something.  So why are we so hard on ourselves?  Being a mom is hard.  I wish I could find a way to disconnect the motherly guilt that comes with parenthood.  Can't they just cut that loose when they cut the umbilical cord?

Either way, whether you're feeling like a good mom today or a mean old witch, have a very Happy Mother's Day this weekend.  I love being a mom and wouldn't trade it for the world.  It is the most torturous, hilarious, frustrating, exhausting, rewarding job I could ever imagine.  I raise my Dew to women and mothers everywhere.  Here's to you and the fact that you suck at your job as much as I do. 

Cheers!