A Mother’s Day Uprising

2. "Put Yourself in Your Little-Girl Shoes"
I cannot tell you the long list of gobbledygook I argued about with my mother. When I was four, I thought she was a monster because I had to go to nursery school in pants that weren't quite dry. In the fourth grade, her explanation about the birds and the bees had me apoplectic with disbelief. By the seventh grade, I was convinced that my mother was just willfully ignorant.

When we are children, we are hindered by our innocence and naiveté and thus unable to see the world through our mother's eyes. "We're all Alice in Wonderland as children," as Fuerstein puts it. Now, nearly 30 years later, I've realized that sometimes getting to work on time is more important than dry Garanimals. Many of the internalized images of our mothers simply aren't accurate. So let's stop being hard on our own mothers, too.

3. "Long Live the Good-Enough Mother"
Good parenting used to be defined as whether or not your kid made it out of your house alive at age 18. OK, that's an exaggeration; but over the last 150 years, the notion of what or who makes a good mother has grown completely out of control. You can find some studies that show that working moms are bad for kids and others that allege the same thing about stay-at-home moms. Moms who breast-feed for a long time are creepy; bottle-feeding moms are negligent. We're made to worry about measles prevention or autism; bottled or homemade baby food. You name the maternal behavior, and I bet there's a university study out there somewhere saying it's bad for children and another one saying it's good. Can we all just simply agree that there is no such thing as a perfect mother?

4. "Gray's the Thing in Mothering"
This doesn't have to be a Mommy War. Think of a healthy self-esteem and a forgiving and supportive mommy in our mind as one more weapon in a mothers' arsenal. Fuerstein explained to me: "When you have low self-worth, it is difficult to believe that you deserve loving treatment." And that, she added; "means you don't have the generosity of spirit or compassion to have empathy for others." Maybe that explains why we're so hard on other mothers. Perhaps we should call a truce with the mommies on our block and worry about the mommy in our mind. She needs a time out. And remember this: let your partner, if you have one, do some parenting, too.

Happy Mother's Day.

© 2009