Bad Mother

I finished "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace" by Ayelet Waldman. I had read a few of her columns online and loved what she had to say, and the book is no different. Here is my favorite passage, from the chapter "So Ready to Be the Mother of a Loser":

"There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature. It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction. They'll look at you, stricken, and beg you not to harangue the coach, not to harass the mother of the boy who didn't invite them to the birthday party, not to intervene to rescind the lousy trade of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards they made. You want to protect them, but sometimes what you have to protect them from is the ongoing avalanche of your own childhood - crashing down on you like a hail of dodgeballs."

Oh, and I also love this, from the end of the book:

"Even if I'm setting myself up for failure, I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is. A mother who doesn't fret over failings and slights, who realizes that her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgment of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn't worry so much about being bad or good, but just recognizes that she's both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad."