The Good Enough Mother

Mother’s Day is this weekend and the stores are chock full of all those ridiculous, over the top Hallmark Cards with flowers and hummingbirds and sweet-nothings written inside. Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I bet most people don’t believe half the words in the cards they give to their moms. I always go with humor because it feels slightly more authentic. This year is my second Mother’s Day as a mom and I’m choosing to celebrate the idea of the “good enough” mother. From the second you deliver your baby (heck, the second you get knocked up!), there’s a whole lot of pressure to be the mom that the Mother’s Day cards say you are. Maybe it’s self-imposed pressure because you think you should be a certain way, maybe it’s coming from your own mother, or maybe you’ve read too much in US Weekly about Kate Middleton. The media’s portrayal of the Duchess of Cambridge’s motherhood is a fantasy. She’s not even a real Princess, she’s a Duchess! The reality is…Kate is not a Hallmark card mom. Neither am I and neither are you. The other reality…we don’t need to be.

Donald Winnicott was a pediatrician in England and later became a psychoanalyst and consultant who worked a lot with parents and children in the 1950s. He is the father of the term “good-enough mother.” Through his work, Winnicott saw that children were best able to learn and adapt to the external world when their mothers FAILED to meet their every need. When the moms were imperfect, it had a positive effect on the resiliency of the child. Mothers are not good and mothers are not bad. They are somewhere in between. They are human! Thank you, Winnicott! 

We can’t provide everything for our children no matter how hard we try. Let your kids see your mistakes, shortcomings, your angry feelings, your sad feelings. This will give them permission to experience those things, too, in life. You are not only teaching them how to have manners, how to share toys, and how to brush teeth. You are teaching them how to f*ck up and then deal with it by fixing it or living with it if it’s unfixable. You’re showing them how to argue and then repair a relationship (we've all argued with our partners in front of the kids). You’re showing them that a perfect mom, perfect child, perfect teacher are illusory characters only found in magazines and Hallmark cards. I cannot kiss my daughter’s boo-boo away. I’m not a magician. I can’t solve all of her problems, and honestly, I will have probably contributed to some of them as she gets older. But, I can apologize for opening the refrigerator into her head and hurting her by accident. I can help take care of her after my mistake. I can take her to the doctor for the right care. 

So, this Mother’s Day…let’s celebrate the fact that we are good enough. And that that’s really all we need to be. 

For further reading on Winnicott: 

http://changingminds.org/disciplines/psychoanalysis/theorists/winnicott.htm