Bad Mom, Good Mom, Great Mom

It's all perspective, baby.

I'll start with great mom. It makes me feel better to begin there.

This is, of course, from the perspective of my pack of kids. Yesterday afternoon I took them to play with their cousins, all 5 of them, and about 10 or 15 of their close pals. After an outdoor play time, a pinic-ish dinner and a short car ride, we arrived. Midget Mecca. That, oh so special, pizza palace with the big rodent.

Can we just all agree that this place is really a toddler version of Vegas? Here's my conspiracy theory. Those pushers of poker in Vegas secretly own all these pizza/game joints and are just grooming our youngest members of society to think that throwing money into the trash is just so stinking cool you have to do it. Give it some sparkly lights, loud music and the bing, bing, bing of slot machines and they know how to use a swipe card to spend tokens before they're potty trained.

Ahem.

Anyway, that particular trip, made me a great mom. Also an exhausted mom. It's tough getting home after 10PM with a van full of little ones.

Now, on to good mom, bad mom.

This won't be news to anyone, but I'm hoping if I write it down the lessons will stick harder.

In the last few months I've had yet another mommy a-ha moment. Bad parenting is really easy. Good parenting is exhausting and leaves you considering picking up a bad habit to soothe yourself.

I'm learning to put all my effort into good parenting. I'm wishing I had been smarter 10 years ago when I started this game. But, I wasn't. Back then I was in pure survival mode.

My excuse? I had an undiagnosed special needs kid, a marriage in crisis, no friends and no faith. I was in debt up past my eye balls and working an awful job. Life was looking pretty bleak. I didn't know how to cope with myself, let alone a child that wouldn't behave like the books and doctors said he should. He didn't act like any of the other kids I knew.

My bad parenting style is to yell until the "crisis" of bad behavior stops. Let me tell you how genius that looks with an infant or toddler.

No, I'm sure not proud of it and I don't share it to pat myself on the back and say look at me and how good I am now. No, not at all. I say it to help other moms. I think that there are moms out there that are like I was. Stuck in what seems like an awful spot all alone.

It's pretty hard to look in the mirror and admit your parenting skills stink. Mom's are supposed to arrive with all the right parenting skills as soon as the baby arrives. Some Mom's work that way, others don't. It's pretty hard to look at your precious child and admit that they aren't the same as everyone else's. Something inside of them is different.

The good mom? Well, she's the one who's kind and self-controlled. She's the one that doesn't snap and scream. She's the one who teaches the kids to solve their own issues and live with the consequences of their choices with grace. She's the one who parents calmly through the same situation over and over again, without showing her child how badly she wants to hit her head on the wall instead of have this same talk again and again. Being a good mom is the most exhausting and time consuming thing ever.

Am I a good mom? Well, honestly, not nearly as much as I want to be. It's taken me 10years to figure out this is the way to go. I've read more parenting books than any other person I know. I've sought out doctors galore. I've prayed. As a foster parent, I've had what seems like a gazillion hours of parenting training by "experts". Then I prayed harder. I've gathered around myself packs of mommy friends to be able to watch them and try to learn. In the end, I had to discover it for myself. Now, it's sort of a "duh" kind of thing. How could I have wandered so long before noticing that this was the thing that really works? All those things I tried, helped, but none of them alone was the magic bullet.

And that's really the point. Each and every kid is unique, and so is each and every parent and family. Each one, each situation will have to be handled fresh and worked through--yes, worked--being seen with new eyes for what it really is. We have to stop looking for the magic and just get down to business.

Being a good mom really isn't about the mom feeling good. It's really about doing good by your kid.