How Can You Be a Good Mother Amongst All Expectations
Is it even possible or are we supposed to fail?
Ever since I got pregnant 16 years ago with my first child, I have been struggling with the concept of becoming a good mother. How are you supposed to take on a role where the conditions are everchanging, where the rules are flexible, and the goalpost is always moving? How can you meet all the expectations around you and how can you navigate around your own expectations when you have no experience of knowing what’s coming around the next corner? How can you get good at something when it feels that you are not good enough? How can you comply with everything your kid needs when you don’t even know which behaviour of yours will bring the best result — as society tells you one thing, your mother another, your mother-in-law another and your gut feeling is something completely different from all the above?
Being a mother is the toughest job in the world. Even being a shitty mother is tough. The worst mothers (the way one would define these changes from person to person, so this is already an impossible definition, to begin with) struggle too. Because being a mother — or a parent for that effect, but I am a mother therefore I can only describe this part — is difficult. Emotionally, physically, mentally, and financially. In every way.
