Are You Human Enough? The Mother’s Day Edition
There has been a ton of buzz around the latest cover of Time magazine, the one with the mother breastfeeding her toddler next to the title “Are You Mom Enough?” The goal of the picture is to shock people who aren’t accustomed to seeing this sort of thing, and the goal of the title is to feed the flames of the “Mommy Wars” which is a manufactured controversy made up to sell magazines and to create heated comment sections online. I personally don’t know any mommies who are at war with any other real mommies. I do know plenty of mothers (and fathers) who are at war with an impossible ideal of perfection in parenting. Many of us are already asking ourselves whether we are “Mom enough,” and we don’t need the shock-seeking Time staff to try stir that pot any more than it is already being stirred on a daily basis.
On Mother’s Day especially, the ideal of perfection in mothering is written on many Mother’s Day Cards. Mothers are endlessly patient; always know what their children need; give cheerfully without asking for anything in return; never seem to need space, and so on. The mother on the cover of Time glares out from the magazine stand and Time says, “Are you Mom enough? Can you do THIS?” I imagine her next move is to do gymnastics while nursing… We are meant to believe that she’s judging us, but my guess is that she is, like the rest of us, scrambling to live up to her own ideal of the perfect mommy.
The problem with the ideal of the perfect mother is that behavior gets split into extremes: perfect is good and acceptable while human is bad and unacceptable. This leads us to hide or bury our humanness in the shadows, separated from the rest of reality. The unspoken message we give to our children by burying humanness in favor of the ideal is that it is also not okay for them to be perfect. Unspoken messages are the most powerful ones, and the most confusing, especially if we say something completely different with our words. So, today for Mother’s Day, I ask all mothers this: Are you human enough? What ideal are you trying to meet that is keeping you from being real with yourself and your children? What have you pushed into the shadows for fear that you won’t be the perfect mom? Shine some light onto those human parts, admit that you will never be perfect, and neither will the woman on Time, your own mother, the your kids’ friends’ mothers, or any mother that has ever lived.