I had a nice chat with one of my friends this morning. It was one of those ‘mom’ chats, where you cram everything and anything in because you don’t have kids with you and you have a lot of words to use since you’ll be alone the rest of the day sort of chats. The kind that at the surface to an onlooker isn’t that meaningful, but the two engrossed in it get so much out of.
Anyway, mostly we talked about how we have these lofty goals and expectations for ourselves. She mentioned how hard it is sometimes as a mom to know what is right in a situation involving our kids and gave an example. It was a particularly hard morning, her kindergartener missed the bus and through a series of events that followed just had a meltdown in the school office.
Her little boy was just plain overwhelmed. She was just plain at a loss of what to do. So she did what she thought was best and now looking back on it she wished she had known to just scoop him up, take him home and give him her undivided attention because that’s plain and simple what he needed that day.
Sometimes life would be more simple if being a mom came with an instruction book and was all laid out with no room for deviation on our part, the part of our children or husbands or in-law or parents or friends…you get the picture. Like the book from the LEGO movie where President Business has everything written out for the people of Brickland. If everyone followed it life would be perfect.
My friend said there was a song she heard once. It went something like ‘I want to be like you so he can see Jesus in me.’ (I think these are the lyrics to the song she referenced.) A great song with a great message, but it is a song. It is an ideal. It isn’t real life for my friend, for me or for you. If you can attain this, then wonderful. If you can strive for this, then I encourage
you. If you are beating yourself up because you feel you can never achieve this, then stop!
We as moms are doing the best we can. You are doing the best you can. You are loving your children. We can all do better. But we can’t do better if we are always comparing ourselves to what might have been, what someone else is doing, or how someone else is able to do more of something we aren’t even doing.
We have to do our own best. Some day our best will be even better than it is today because we will have gotten so much practice!
Take it easy. Remember, it’s just a song. Someone else’s song that you can strive to claim as your own.
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