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There is no such thing as a perfect mother. My husband told me that about a week after our baby was born when I was feeling bad about not getting to him fast enough when he cried out of hunger. “It’s not going to hurt him to cry for an extra minute,” he said.

My husband had it right. It just took me a few months to get there, but once I did, I grabbed onto the idea of the “good enough mother” and haven’t let go. When I look back, I realize that the pressure of perfection made my life so much more difficult than it had to be.

I would wonder whether I’d made a mistake by putting my baby down for his first nap too late. Would that mean I’ve ruined his sleep pattern for the whole day? When I forgot to file his nails and he scratched himself I blamed myself for not protecting him better. When I changed a diaper and saw poop that might have been there for an hour, I’d fear that I was going to give him diaper rash.

I was on high alert all the time. As my friend who’s a psychiatrist described it: I was in the unhealthy mental state of “hyper vigilance,” behaving like an emergency room doctor waiting for the next disaster to come through the door. But I had a healthy baby, not an emergency waiting to happen. Why was I acting that way?

When I started to hear car horns honking in the street and misinterpret them for the sounds of my baby crying, I knew I needed to change. My husband and I talked about the situation and we came to a hard-to-grasp realization. Caring for a baby is a trial and error learning experience. There is no way around this. Instead of blaming myself for the small errors, I began to view each error as a positive lesson.

My husband and I changed the way we described things. We talked about what we could do differently next time, not about what mistakes we made. For instance, he said, “from now on, if the baby suddenly goes from being happy to cranky, I will check his diaper.”

We also talked about the origin of the desire to be a perfect mother. In the article “Flawed & fabulous moms: Why great parenting isn’t perfect” by Rachel Sarah in BabyCenter Magazine, the author makes a great point:

“As our society becomes more child-centered, parents feel more and more in the service of their children – and more pressured to do everything right. There’s a pervasive sense of blame that tells us, no matter how your kid turns out, all his flaws point back to you: The wrong kind of discipline, the wrong foods, the wrong reading materials, even what you eat during pregnancy will affect your child. Is it any wonder we want to be “perfect”? We want to stay off the firing range!”

What I wish I had done was talk about these things with my husband before I had my baby. I am a pretty easygoing person and I thought my calm nature would automatically carry over into child-rearing. Nine months after having our baby, it has, but it took conscious effort to get here. So I’m sharing my mistake, I mean lesson, with you:   Before the baby comes, talk to your partner about normal parenting missteps that can be expected and how you will not worsen the errors by finding fault with each other. Accept the trial and error method and know that it works. After all, it’s the only way to parent and survive.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Baby Prep, Emotional Support, Verbal Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.