The Good Mom’s Club

Mom. Mom. MOM. It’s our name. It’s overused. We hear it three billion times a day.

But What is a Mom?

Well, because I am a “millennial,” the first place I turn to is the internet of course. (Duh). According to Merriam-Webster.com: A mom is “a mother.” Well, okay, that is certainly obvious.

So what is a mother. Merriam-Webster offers several definitions:

“ 1. a female parent ; a woman in authority;  an old or elderly woman”

“2. Source, origin”

“3. maternal tenderness or affection”

“4. short for motherf$#%#$; (sometimes vulgar )“

“5. something that is an extreme or ultimate example of its kind especially in terms of scale”

So, to sum up the dictionary definition: a mother is a female parent, the matriarch of the family unit, the origin of a child who is also old, tender, affectionate and sometimes vulgar. She is the model of its kind.

That is all well and good and sounds about right. But what does it mean?

Hindsight is 20/20 and I look back knowing I did not appreciate my mom when I was a kid nearly enough and certainly not as much as I do now. (Love you mom!) Perhaps it is because parenting is so hard and I never realized that until I became a parent myself. With social media and a generation obsessed with oversharing, it has only made parenting harder in my opinion. So I have sat and asked myself a hundred times: What is a mom and how do you be a good one?

So what makes a good mom?

As a mom, I feel utterly shamed by society for every single choice I make for my child (soon to be children). Every. Single. One. [Please refer to Mom-Shaming: Damned if you Do, Damned if you Don’t]. In my opinion, society has completely contradicted itself in terms of defining a “good” mom mostly because society’s expectations of a female and society’s expectations of a “good” mom have some vast differences rendering it nearly impossible to be “good” (by society’s standard) at either “female-ing” or “mommy-ing.”

For an example:

1. As a female, society has several different expectations:
   1. I should climb the corporate ladder and pierce the glass ceiling. (This requires working…perhaps more than a 40 hour work week)
   2. I should cook, clean, do all the household chores and serve my husband (To do this effectively, this essentially requires not having a job)
   3. I should get married and have babies (This requires wanting to actually get married and have children)
   4. I should be active in my community (politically, in church, volunteering, etc).

2. As a mom, society has several different expectations:

1. I should be a stay at home mom, because children need their moms.
2. I should be active in school life, attending PTA and being a doting homeroom mom who bakes gluten free treats on a weekly basis.
3. I should enroll my children in a gazillion activities so they are well rounded and never miss a scheduled activity
4. I should take my children to the zoo, park, museum, or some sort of learning-type activity every weekend.
5. I should dress them in the best clothes always matching to perfection.
6. I should make my own baby food to insure they receive the absolute best nutrition
7. I should be married, be a certain age, established, with no debt to insure my child has all the financial support necessary.

These lists are generalizations and possibly slightly exaggerated. But it is clear that several of these are nearly mutually exclusive. I can’t be a stay at home mom and work 60 hours a week to climb that corporate ladder and/or be the next state representative. I also can’t work 60 hours a week and attend every PTA meeting, never miss an event, and make my own baby food all while maintaining a spotless home without a single piece of dirty laundry or a speck of dust to be seen.

The moral of the story is: you, as a mom, get to define a mom. Whether you work and manage to make 90% of your child’s school functions and pack peanut butter sandwiches or lunchables while maintaining livable conditions in your household or whether you are a stay at home mom who matches their child’s clothes every day and makes your own baby food: only you get to decide what the definition of a mom is. Society does not get to tell us what we must accomplish to be a successful mom (or female).

Whether old or young, whether one child or twenty, you choose the definition of a mom.

Now that you wrapped your head around that, ask yourself this: Is your child fed, clothed, loved and cared for? Presuming your answer is yes, then, you, my friend, are a one hell of a good mom.

Welcome to the Good Moms club.