After seven years of motherhood, I have finally come to learn something…
not to lay the mom-guilt on myself so much. We all have moments where we do not deserve to win Mother of the Year…you know the drill….allowing your kids to watch mindless hours of TV while you feed your computer addiction, screaming curse words at the top of your lungs because you have lost just about every ounce of your weaning patience, sometimes doing everything yourself around the house just because it is easier than taking the time to actually teach them what needs to be done and so on and so forth…the list can go on and on if I put enough thought into it. But as much as I could beat myself up for not being a so called “perfect” mom, I could also give myself a pat on the back for being a pretty darned good one.
Life is not supposed to be utopia, right? Childhood is supposed to be a happy time, but it is not intended to be a complete Pollyanna life. So you see by rearing my ugly head every once in awhile, I am inadvertantly teaching my girls an important life lesson…right?
But today, we didn’t have any bad moments, ridden with mom-guilt. With Erin still rounding out the end of her school year, Megan and I had a chance to spend some quality mother/daughter time together. We enjoyed a girls’ lunch, took in an afternoon matinee and then rounded out the afternoon baking together.
“Mommy, can we bake Christmas cookies?” Megan asked me when we returned home. Quick to have a “no” to my lips, I thought a second and then replied, “Why not?” I had only scraped together ingredients to make chocolate-chip/walnut cookies and didn’t quite have everything needed for the fancier cookies that she had requested. But no mind…she decided that gingerbread cut-outs were in order. She ran into her play kitchen and fetched her wooden trays, checkerboard napkins, mini potholders and pretend cookies.
And then we set off to the task at hand…baking. We slid on our aprons and then cracked eggs all over the floor, spilled vanilla on the countertops and licked raw cookie dough. At another time when I am rushed to just get the task done, the mess that lie before me would most likely get on my nerves. But today was all about Megan and our time together…so I let her just do her thing…make a mess and just enjoy the process. And I pretended not to notice when I caught her sneaking chips out of the bag. So we baked up a few dozen or so cookies…all the while listening to Alan Jackson’s Christmas album…while the air conditioner hummed at a cool 72 degrees.
Times like these outshadow the bad ones, don’t they?
I like to think so.
