Good Mom — Bad Mom
Writing down the ways I've mom'd for better or worse
We all want to be Good Moms.
Just last night, I surprised myself at how far I was willing to go to accommodate my 2.5-year-old daughter, Sutton. Steaming arugula stung my fingertips as I pulled it off the pizza in the front seat of my car. Electric pink food coloring stained my now-scorched fingers from a project I’d set up for her a few hours before. I knew I had to document this low of mothering, or was it a high? It’s hard to tell these days.
My little angel rejected the pizza (I also pulled the sausage off because she’s a pepperoni girl) because one sesame seed-sized piece of arugula escaped my efforts.
How did I get here?
I imagine I reached what most would describe as a low…because being a Good Mom in 2024 comes with sky-high expectations. Here’s a handful from the Internet and/or real people:
-Rotate your toddler’s (Montessori) toys and somehow find space for the wooden toys not currently in rotation in your 2-bed, 1-bath bungalow without a garage.
-Stop wearing leggings; for God’s sake, put on jeans. Even though your husband also wears joggers daily and nobody’s telling him it's time to move on from this pandemic-induced WFH uniform, To clarify, this is an Internet suggestion. My husband wouldn’t dare suggest I wear real pants, haha.
-Commit to the full-time job of starting solids and BLW at six months. When your toddler becomes picky at 18 months, it’s because you didn’t offer enough variety to them aka the floor or trashcan.
-Don’t be a career mom who needs any form of scheduled care for your child, but also don’t be a SAHM without a side hustle, that’s lazy.
I bounce between feeling like a good mom and a bad mom throughout the day and especially during the absolute triage that is the hours of 5:30-7:30 each night. Most of my bad mom feelings are related to screen time, but decisions on childcare, nutrition, activities, and bribes also bring them on. All things I obsess over. I wonder if my husband ever feels like a bad dad. I’ve never asked him. I can’t imagine these are the things he thinks about in the middle of the night.
Good Mom — Bad Mom Moments of Late
I started thinking about the highs and lows of my parenting more, wondering which fell into which category. Sometimes, they seem to cross, like when you celebrate a small win of a tearless daycare drop-off driven by the chocolate chip you snuck your kid for being brave. Can’t we rebrand bribes as distractions and release ourselves from the guilt?
Decide for yourself which of these moments lands in GM or BM territory. Let me know if you adopt any of them, and please share yours with me.
A New Strategy for Immediate Behavior Change
I’ve started fake calling my daughter’s teachers multiple times a week to get her to stop or start doing something. It started as a warning that I would call “Ms. Ashley…” unless some behavior stopped or she started doing something I’d already asked her to do multiple times. It’s a lazy tactic, but I know at this age, my daughter is hard-wired to push boundaries, and after being poked at all day (great for her development, not so great for my mental well-being), I need something to fall back on.
When my sister overheard me use this method, she said she needed to create a fake teacher to call for her daughter.
The “calls” worked, but I quickly realized it didn’t need to be in a negative tone. Now I call Ms. Ashley or Ms. Kenna and say things like, “Oh, Sutton was really helpful at school today? That’s so great, she’s having a rough go right now. I’ll remind her how helpful she was at school and see if she can be helpful at home, too.” Surprisingly, this works and will be my go-to move until it stops working, which will most likely be as soon as I finish this sentence.
Setting up a Post-Nap Project
This idea is 100% my own, and nobody else has ever thought of it or shared it.
My daughter usually wakes up around 3:30 or 4 pm from her one nap a day. She’s 2.5 and I know how lucky I am that she still takes a substantial nap. It’s a tough transition when she wakes up though. She’s groggy, I’m in the afternoon slump and sometimes she wakes up super hangry. Usually she glares at my idea to read books and snuggle until she fully wakes up. Instead, she wants to watch something. I get it, I would want to do the same if I just woke up and some days it’s the best path for us.
One day, I decided to cut her off before she voiced her idea of post-nap screen time. I set up her watercolors and put her treasured seashell she found on a walk and her tiny bunny rabbit toy next to the paints. When she woke up, I told her I had set up a project for her, and she was THRILLED. She ran out of her bedroom, up to her tower and before I could even get out my schpeel about how bunny wanted to watch her paint, she started crying.
She thought the project was going to be food coloring-based. It’s one of our go-to time passers, putting food coloring on baking soda and letting her drop vinegar on it to make it bubble up. That was not the project, and I was out of baking soda. She was as furious as a 2-year-old could be. We ended up watching a show to repair the complete betrayal she felt, but I know this will work next time. As long as I can mind-read exactly which project she wants me to surprise her post-nap with.
Laughing in Difficult Moments
Toddlers love to be in on the joke. My husband and I were having some sort of stupid disagreement the other day and I started laughing in a omg-I-can’t-believe-you-right-now-way. Our daughter started fake laughing which then made my husband laugh and we moved on from whatever seemed important enough to argue about.
Then, a few days later, after what seemed like the longest stretch of crying I’ve endured from Sutton since she was a baby, I started laughing while singing her songs before her nap. And guess what…her scream-crying stopped instantly. Replaced with full-on belly laughs. I couldn’t believe it. She’d been scream-crying (because she wanted to read more books, you know how that goes) for the last 25 minutes as I prepped her for nap. She has her molars coming in and was overtired. I was at my breaking point. I started singing louder and louder to try and calm her slash drown cries out. I know that sounds awful, but I remember reading one time that if you sssshhh loud enough it reminds a baby of being in the womb. Singing isn’t the same thing, but at the moment, it felt right. Don’t they say to trust your gut in parenting?
Mama Lays Out the Clothes
Sutton just started really wanting to put on her underwear and pants by herself, which is wonderful and also a little terrifying to watch. She gets so frustrated when her leg goes in the wrong hole and what started as an exciting new task spirals into a sad meltdown. She’ll sob, “I want to do it all by myself” while flailing around on the floor with two legs in one pant leg, refusing any help from me.
After enduring days of this, I set a new expectation. I told her she was still really little and that mama needed to lay out her clothes for her to be able to put them on herself. I asked her not to touch them until they were perfectly laid out in front of her and then asked her which foot she wanted to start with. Since she wasn’t crumpling the pants up in frustration, she could put one foot in and then move on to the second foot. She even tolerated me helping just a little by opening the second leg hole for her. Some days, she’s able to get her clothes on easily; others, there’s still a struggle, but it’s a big improvement from where we were at.
A Chocolate Chip Fix for Daycare Dropoff
I wrote a Note about this life-changing bribe, but I thought it was worth re-sharing here. After telling one of my best friends about how upsetting daycare dropoff was for my daughter (and me), she said her daughter cried for six months of dropoff. Then, they offered her a Tic Tac as a special treat for being brave and not crying…poof! She was fine at dropoff. I immediately went to Target and bought a pack of orange Tic Tacs and a large bag of gummy bears.
After my excitement over an instant fix wore off, I questioned whether Tic Tacs or gummy bears were safe to give Sutton. Instead, I decided a chocolate chip might work. The next day, I told her she could have a chocolate chip if she was brave and didn’t cry at drop-off. She walked into the school holding my hand instead of clinging to me like a koala bear. Then, the real test was getting into her classroom. I snuck her a chocolate chip as we walked in. No tears yet. I put her backpack and lunchbox away and took off her shoes. Calm as a cucumber. I hugged her and expected the tears to start flowing, but no. My brave girl, powered by a single chocolate chip, waved goodbye to me. I walked out feeling sure it was a fluke.
Instead of the instant mom guilt that usually greeted me, I returned to my car clear-headed and looking forward to my few hours of distraction-free work. This was life-changing. It’s worked every time since she sometimes doesn’t even ask for a chocolate chip.
Yesterday, as I dropped her off - chocolate smeared on her happy little face, I couldn’t help but feel awful for the little boy rocking alone in the corner with two stuffies. I also felt bad for the teacher who was trying her best to comfort him as he shut down her advances, wailing. The scene looked traumatic for the little boy, and the craziest thing is my daughter was crying just as hard as him a few weeks before. As parents, we fear our choices will result in permanent damage to our kids. We have thoughts like maybe they’re not ready, maybe I shouldn’t be leaving them, maybe they really do need me 24/7.
To flip the situation with one chocolate chip seems impossible. I’ve dropped Sutton off for some form of minimal outside care since she was six months old. I think it's worth noting that no matter how much care you need for your child, it probably feels like too much. Enduring the drop-off tears is brutal for parents. I wish I would have known the power of an (age-appropriate) teeny tiny bribe distraction a long time ago.