I’m not talking about the catastrophic losses.
I’m talking about the threads of grief that so often get called guilt and which seem to come woven into the cloak of Motherhood. The Could’a, Would’a, Shoulda’s of Mothering…
When your child gets hurt, whether physically or emotionally. Or when you learn something late in life, that now seems like it would have saved your children grief and pain in their younger years if you’d only known it then. When you flat out, don’t have the energy to be nice, or polite or to say the loving thing when your child needed it… When for whatever reasons, you look back and see that you were mean… or thoughtless.
These are the things that all good Mothers Grieve.
We do the best we can, with what we know in every moment of every day…
… and yet, because this job can never be done perfectly,
… and because we are not perfect anyway…
We grieve the moments when our children hurt…
… when we feel like we should have, could have protected them better…. if we’d only known how.
Or maybe you grieve that you held your child a little too close… and you think you should have let them get a little bit muddier….
No matter which way you cut it, Mother’s grieve.
This month, as Mother’s Day approaches, accept credit for the moments when you mothered well and forgive yourself for the moments when you fell short of being the perfect mother of your dreams. xox