The mom I would have been
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The other day I was rambling around the internet, as one does, and came across something that really burned me up, as one does. The post in question was part of a genre I’ll call “real talk, mamas,” which is where a mom (or sometimes a dad) complains about early parenthood and other parents chime in with affirmation on how hard/boring/thankless it is to care for your child when they are a baby. After spending way too many minutes of my precious life composing retorts that I would never send to this internet stranger, I stopped to think about why I had such a problem with people complaining about their children online. I also had a problem with people who pretended their lives were perfect and #blessed, so why wasn’t I applauding these people who were “keeping it real”?
The easy answer would be that, since my first child died shortly after birth, I have no patience for people whining about having to spend time with their living, breathing, healthy baby who is just doing normal baby things. The harder, and maybe more true answer is that I recognized myself in those complaining moms. In fact, I probably would have been one of them if my daughter had survived. When I was pregnant with her, I followed all those perfect moms on Instagram, out of a morbid fascination, half hate and half envy. I had a tall stack of parenting books ready by my bedside and my unborn daughter was already on the waitlist of a meticulously researched daycare. I was pre-emptively having arguments in my head with my partner about how we could ensure that the division of childcare and housework was exactly 50/50.
After she died, all of the perfectionism and striving went right out the window. I permanently deleted all my social media accounts and never looked back. In a moment of rage, I threw all the parenting books right in the trashcan (I know that’s not very environmentally friendly, but recycling wasn’t going to satisfy my rage. I wanted those books incinerated on an industrial scale).
I’ve already failed as a mother in the most profound way possible, which gave me a serious shift in perspective. It changed my definition of failure. It rearranged my priorities. Color-coded nursery and cloth diapering fell waaay down the list – actually, they fell off the list completely.
Arranging the logistics and payment to cremate your own child – that’s hard. It’s a level of parenting difficulty that most will never achieve, because most parents will not outlive their children. Changing a poopy diaper, even if you are sleepy, even if it’s the 200th poopy diaper, is easy, my pleasure. It does not matter in the slightest whether the diapers are cloth, compostable, organic, or just Pampers.
In an alternate universe where my daughter lived, who knows what kind of mom I would have been. Maybe my love for her would have transformed me in the same way I am transformed now, and I would have been able to let go of the perfectionism and comparisons. But maybe I would have focused on tiny injustices instead of how lucky I was to have her. Maybe I would have made my partner miserable by keeping a tally of every single diaper change and late-night feeding to ensure fair division of labor. It’s something I try to avoid contemplating too deeply, because I’m averse to any attempt to find the “bright side” of a child’s death. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that her death has inextricably changed me as a parent. It’s not better or worse, I’m just a different person. That alternate universe is not accessible to me, so there is no option to “trade” my newfound perspective for my daughter’s life. I can only live in the here and now, and do my best to love and parent in a way that honors her.
How do you think through this question we’ve probably all entertained: what kind of parent would I have been if…? How do you relate to the “perfect” parents of social media and the influencer realm? Is there any parenting advice you have found helpful?