I’m just not that kind of mom.
Even as I said it, I knew that it was both true in the context of the conversation and that I wished there was a different way to explain it. I really wished it didn’t have to be explained at all.
While I understand the mom role naturally changes, I have felt an accelerated shift for myself. The children are getting older the way children do. They are becoming more self sufficient. They are beginning to have their own pre and new adult situations. Situations that, while somewhat similar to my own coming of age, have enough notable differences to be nearly unrecognizable.
21st century parenting, my friends, is not for the weak.
Next school year will find the baby in middle school and two more high school graduations. My Pinterest feed suggests that I should be an endless fount of tears and runny mascara.
I am not.
Our children are co parented and loved by multiple sets of people. My Instagram and Facebook wall suggests that I should defend my position, stay in my lane, feel guilt over the situation to begin with, and celebrate the putting of oneself first.
I do none of these things.
I am just not that kind of mom.
I am a mom advocate. I absolutely love moms. All different kinds of moms – young, old, helicopter, tiger, free range, formula, breast, co sleep, cribs, empty nester, adoptive, birth, borrowed, stay at home, working, organic, boxed, single, attached, woke, tired, balanced, frazzled, together, hot mess, bowed, laced, legging, designer – whatever. I. Love. Moms.
Outside of being a kid, I am of the opinion that being a mom is arguably one of the hardest things to be in cyberspace. I am hard pressed to think of another group who’s collective is, by nature, amazingly personal and infinitely varied, while simultaneously expected to live up to a complex set of changing, unattainable, and contradictory rules.
To this end, I am becoming super comfortable giving the whole “good mom/bad mom” idea a big “whatthefuckever.”
I have known since the early days of my motherhood journey 21 years ago that, while this little creature was completely dependent on me at the moment, it was neither the way it was going to be, nor the way it was supposed to be for long. This child was, and all the children that came after her were, going to leave me. They, if I was ever so lucky, were going to grow and want, and do, and be. All that would come with a change of phone number, a change of address, and a roof and mailbox that were not mine.
In the meantime, these creatures were not programmable. I could not order them according to specifications. They were not given to me to create in my own image. God had already done that. They came into this world people in their own right. It was my job to provide them the safest, healthiest, resource rich environment where they could feel the freedom to learn who they were in their own skin. I failed routinely. I still fail. But that’s part of the deal too. I cannot be perfect and my children cannot be perfect. In our flaws, we feel grace and compassion for each other. We are in this thing together.
Because of this awareness, I have never felt an ownership over my children. They do not validate or define me as a person. I am infinitely thankful for them. I will defend them with ferocity and would sacrifice my breath happily for theirs. But that is because I love them unconditionally, not because of some uterine relationship I may or may not have.
My mother and I are extremely close. We always have been. I also have always had a variety of strong women in my life who love me and I love in return. My mother never restricted those relationships, made me feel guilty for loving another, or suggested that she felt threatened or betrayed – because she wasn’t. Nothing about any of those relationships changed who she was and who I was. What those relationships did do was give me more experiences, more confidence, more perspective, more love, more more.
I was also able to see a bunch of women mommying differently. Not right, not wrong, just different. As I joined their ranks, I saw more variety, more emotions, more preferences. What I have only come to realize recently is while the outside looks different, I think the source is the same.
Mommies love their babies. And we know, on some level, they are going to leave us and be their own people. The emotion that creates in each of us is different because we are different. I don’t cry on the first day of school. That’s not because I don’t care, it’s simply not an event that makes me feel that kind of way. I know moms who are completely distraught on the first day of school. I love that. It makes me feel better when I think about the time the baby, who I knew would be my last baby, lost her first tooth and I sat on the floor and ugly cried.
I don’t get all up in my feelings when my kid makes a poor life choice. I don’t feel like it is a personal reflection on me or my parenting skills. I do get irritated when they play stupid or become overly self-deprecating and I scold myself for not having more patience. I use my strength in one to encourage moms who are feeling less than and my weakness in the other to remember I am thankful for the moms who mommy different and have my six.
We are all the “other” mom. We are all that kind of mom and not that kind of mom. We are tasked with one of the greatest responsibilities on the planet and that path has an infinite number of options. Sometimes I am not super sure I took the right turn at Albuquerque. But today, I trust myself and I trust my tribe. And I am thankful.