Perspective: All parenting is hard. Don’t compare yourself with others.
By Meg St-Esprit April 10 at 11:34 AM My sweet friend, sitting across my dining room table with her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, tears up as she shares her parenting stress. She has two children, and the weight of motherhood is wearing her down today. I see it in her eyes — that dull ache of everything just being “too much” this week, of feeling like she is failing on every front. I have been there repeatedly — and sometimes feel as if I live perpetually in that state of mind.
I don’t mean to project myself as the poster child for hot-mess motherhood, but I am sure that is exactly what I do at times. Old ladies regularly point out that my baby doesn’t have socks on, and I found an actual mouse in my car eating discarded Goldfish crackers. I used to aspire to be some type of Pinterest-y mom, but I gave up on that before my first could even crawl. Instead, I have striven to be a present and supportive mom.
Just when all our big kids potty-trained and slept through the night, and I returned to work nearly full time again, we welcomed our fourth little one through an unexpected kinship adoption. She is an absolute joy, the happiest baby I have ever met, and we can’t imagine our life without her. But it is still hard. Going back to sleepless nights and diapers and washing 10,000 parts of Dr. Brown’s bottles every day just when we had chucked them takes a mental shift.
I have come to know and love mothers with struggles on every level of the parenting spectrum, and I know that we all have much more in common than we have different.
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