I Need A Better Friend

Are you cutting yourself some slack? Are you letting yourself be good at things you're good at, even if parenting doesn't seem like one of those things this month? If you were your best friend, what would you say to you?  - www.askmoxie.org

So a person knows they probably need an intervention when reading the above quote makes said person burst into tears. I'm not entirely clear on what kind of intervention would be helpful, but my weepiness certainly points to the need for something.


I was with a gathering of women this morning, women I know 7-out-of-10 well. All mothers, all of our children there. I forgot to wear a bra. I don't know, it just happened. But it took a low-grade not-my-best day and magnified it into I Should Probably Quit For The Good Of All. My children played happily with all the other well-parented children of remember-to-wear-bra-mothers and I wondered if they might be better off with them on a longer term basis.


Almost-Friend E asked if I was working yet, and I confessed that sometimes I wondered if I should, but mostly I just wanted to figure out how to be a good mother first. She laughed because moms laugh at these things and I almost burst into tears because as I said it, I realized it was true - I'm really tired of sucking at what I do all day. She assured me that she only hears what a great mom I am and I agreed that my Awesome-Momness is actually pretty amazing. Probably top 10 good. But my bad parenting? Oh. My. Lord. It is awful. And it might be killing me.


I guess it comes as no surprise then, that I might have been a bit fragile when I found the above quote on my favourite mom-site this afternoon. It will be nice when the crying stops.  Cause my best-friend-me is saying to my crying-at-the-computer-me, I have no fucking clue. I guess I can't get past the part about "letting yourself be good at things you're good at, even if parenting doesn't seem like one of those things". It's not like I'm not letting myself - it's more that there really isn't anything else I'm doing one way or the other. I mean, what else do I do? If I go to church, I'm still parenting. If I go shopping, I'm still parenting. I guess in the moments I get alone and go for coffee, I'm pretty good at drinking it. But you know, there's limited pleasure for me in being good at beverage management. And I guess I trip across the bit where if I were to work, it would just be defined as the time when I'm Not Parenting. If I had work that was meaningful to me and that I enjoyed, perhaps that would be okay, but since work has almost always only been an exercise in People Hating, it's hard to imagine the exchange being worthwhile.


To be clear, I am not needing to hear that I'm really, truly, a good parent. If you read this blog, you already know that deep in my heart, I know I'm a Good Parent. It's just that deep in my heart I know that I'm also a Really Bad Parent and I'm kind of tired of it. I'd take hints on how to numb the Feeling Bad part I guess...