I am not a Mom, but I desire to be one. I have a lot of friends who are Mom's, I have had a lot of mother figures in my life, and then of course there is Facebook, which is filled with Mom's.
To me, there is no perfect Mom. Each one is doing the best she can with the circumstances she has been given. Unfortunately, it seems like there are people out there who do think they are the perfect Mom and want everyone to know they are the perfect Mom. The competition scares me.
I want to be a Mom...desperately. But, I love my job. I love having a career. I will probably only stay home for 6 weeks and then go right back to working 9-10 hour days. It's in my blood. It is what drives me. It is what makes me feel whole. Will that make me any less of a Mom? Gosh, I hope not! Just as I don't feel women who choose to be stay at home Mom's are any less of a Mom. We are all wired differently. Different things make different people happy and content.
I look back at my life growing up and it reminds me of the two different 'Mom's' I had. There was my Mom and then there was my Grandma (Nannie).
My Mom was a single parent who worked full time to raise her two children. Part of our lives we lived with my Grandparents and the rest, we lived right next door. There was literally a side walk that connected the two houses. My Mom loved(s) being a Mom. She was PTA president, coached some sports for us, car pooled for my friends. But she also loved her job. That was okay.
My mom was a very independent person. She didn't need a man for anything. (Which drove my Grandpa nuts). She got power tools for Christmas and built the deck on the back of our house by hand. She did it all. Cooked, cleaned, worked and raised us. She was super mom!
Then there was my Grandma! Now that women...wow! She was truly the matriarch of our family. She was a stay at home Mom turned stay at home Grandma. She would feed us breakfast in the morning and get us ready for school because my Mom was already at work. She would give baths, read us books and tuck us in to bed because my Mom would go back to work. After my grandpa retired, she would have a full meal on the table at 5:30 every night for anyone who wanted to eat! There were usually quite a few people. She would have clothes washes, dryed and folded the day after you wore them. There was no dust in her house!
She would go on walks with us, play catch, help teach us to ride bikes. She would go on rides with is at Adventureland. She did it all. Every little thing she did in life was to benefit her family and the people around her.
The crazy thing is, growing up I didn't have a lot of respect for my grandma. I mean, I loved her more than anything in the world but I always thought how much more I wanted out of life then what she had. I wanted a job, an identity. I wanted to pump my own gas and know how to write my own checks. I didn't want to get an allowance from my husband. I wanted to be like my Mom. I wanted it all.
The older I got, the more I realized that my Grandma being the way that she was didn't make her any less of a person than my Mom. She was just different. My Grandma sacrificed so much to put her family first because that is what made her happy, that is what filled her bucket.
So, what I'm saying is, no matter what type of Mom I am, or you are, you just have to be the best that you can be. Do what makes you happy. Be the type that fills your bucket! At the end of the day, no one is any better then the other. Everyone is fighting the same battle!
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