The Worst Mom in the World

There's this mom I know. She makes some of the worst parenting decisions ever. I can't even believe it sometimes. Some of the things she does--how she can think of herself as a good mom at all??

Think I'm being harsh? Here are just a few of the terrible things she has done:

* She wasn't happy when she found out she was having a baby. In fact, she cried. A lot. And not happy tears, either!
* She didn't put her baby on a schedule at all. She was up every hour or two hours all night until her baby was like, 10 months old!
* This one time, she took her baby on a flight across the country, and it screamed the ENTIRE FLIGHT. Ugh--how annoying, right?
* I hear she lets her daughter watch TV EVERY DAY. Sometimes, more than one show a day!
* She gives her daughter the BAD mac-n-cheese.
* She uses canned baby food.
* This mom lets her kid run around the park and she doesn't even watch her every second.
* She left her baby in the car one time while she ran into the gas station.
* Once, she even forgot to strap her baby into the car seat, and then took the FREEWAY HOME. *shudder* Who forgets to strap in the baby??
* Oh my gosh, she lets her kids eat off of the floor, too!
* This one time, her kids were outside in 50-degree weather, and she didn't even have coats for them. Her little baby had blue lips!
* I'm pretty sure she has "heat and serve" dinners pretty much every night of the week. Sometimes, she even goes to TACO BELL for dinner. They have Grade D beef there!
* There have been several times she has said that she doesn't like her kids. Did you hear that? She doesn't like her OWN KIDS sometimes!
* Her daughter will ask, "Mommy, will you play with me?" and she doesn't always say yes. Sometimes, she gets frustrated by the question.
* She has spanked her daughter. In anger!
* Most of the time she looks like a hot mess. She went so long without doing her hair it just stayed put when she took her ponytail holder out.
* She leaves her daughter screaming in the childcare while she works out for an hour.
* Her daughter is 2.5 and STILL not potty trained. And she doesn't even care!
* She says that her favorite time of day is when both her girls are asleep.
* She has non-organic food in the house. And I know she cheats on her diet!
* She let the baby sleep in the bed with her and her husband.
* The baby doesn't have any idea how to put herself to sleep--she has to be rocked to sleep, even at 8 months old!
* She plays music in the car that has bad words and/or bad messages in them.
* Sometimes, she puts her older kid to bed just because she doesn't want to hear her voice anymore.

I mean, seriously. This mom has got a lock on the Bad Mom title. Look at that huge list! And I know there's more. Thank goodness I'm a better mom than her.

Only I'm not. Because, if you might have guessed, the mom "deserving of the Bad Mom title" is ME. I have done all those things above, and countless others. I'm firmly on the "don't" side of the "do's and don't's of parenting" sign.

I fail all the time. All. The. Time. Sometimes, it's an unconscious fail, but often, it's a fully-realized, I-know-this-isn't-the-best-thing kind of fail.

The one that kills me the most is near the end of the list. Lately, Avonlea (who is a very independent girl, and happy to play solo) has been asking "Mommy, will you play with me?" nearly 35 times a day. And every single time she asks me it feels like it is one of those Important Moments. Do I really want to be the mom that says "no" when my 2-year old asks me to play with her?  Of course not.

But...

What if it's the 30th time she's asked you, and you have been playing with her for the last hour, and the load of laundry needs to be switched out? Or the ants are invading the kitchen (again) because the dirty dishes from last night are still on the counter? Or you really need to take a shower? Or, for just this next 20 minutes, you just don't want to? You just want to sit and veg on the couch with a book or a project or an email or a blog post (or yes, Instagram), and have her play by herself.  WHY do I feel like if I choose "me" over "her" once or twice or three times a day (or some days more, if I'm honest), that she's going to end up in therapy because "I remember asking my mom to play with me and she chose to be on her phone instead."

That list above *is* me. I'm going to own it. I screw up. I make mistakes. But I'm also an awesome mom. I have to remind myself a lot, because I screw up a lot. I have to try to not be an awesome* mom, with the asterisk pointing to a footnote that says, "*sometimes."

* I'm REALLY good with reading. We can read the same book 5 times in a row, and I don't get tired of it.
* I'm also good at making up stories on the fly. Today it was about a little girl who wished for adventure and so a magic butterfly came and granted her one wish and turned her house into a rocketship that went to the moon.
* We do amazing karaoke together. And I know every Disney song and I have excellent melody/harmony skills, so we never go off key, and we never start too high or too low. We always have music with us wherever we go, and we love to sing together.
* I am excellent at documenting. Pictures, notes, blogs, baby books--mine are all updated and beautiful. Yes, Aria, too.
* We explore new places together. We have zoo passes and go as often as we can when it's not 8000 degrees. We have been to all the Children's museums in the area and plan to visit a couple more I just heard about. We go to local parks and playgrounds together. We have gone to baseball games and soccer games and theater shows and concerts. We have gone to the pool and to the beach. We have been to Hollywood and to Philadelphia.
* I'm not great, but I'm getting better at making whole food for the kids. I'm reading labels and making better choices.
* I'm conscious about making sure my girls see me interacting with their Daddy in a positive way, and see me interacting with friends and neighbors in a polite way. I want them also to see me taking care of my body, which is why I take them to the gym 3x a week (even when Aria is losing her mind).
* I can ALWAYS make the girls laugh. And unless it's an unusual circumstance, I can always calm them down from a tantrum.
* Avonlea loves green beans and peas and carrots and celery. She loves natural peanut butter and greek yogurt. She loves turkey and ham. I'm trying to have her be as well-rounded as possible so that she makes healthy choices for herself someday.

I guess more than anything, though, is that I try. I WANT to do well. I want to be a good mom, to have my girls turn out mostly okay. I can't do it all on my own, and it certainly isn't easy when the mom guilt kicks in. But I'm trying.

Edited to add: After I published this, an article popped up in my newsfeed from Scary Mommy, and I realized that this sounds very similar to that article. I will link to it here, and say that I did read that article such a long time ago, and its format must have stuck with me. So I guess I was inspired by it, be it extremely unconsciously!