The Motherhood Proclamation

It seems to me that all of us are getting super sick of ragging on each about our choices as moms. I think we’ve reached a point where we need to grab the hand of the woman closest to us and just say “Fuck It.”

I don’t care if your kid sleeps in your bed with you until they are 100 years old or if they have never slept for one second of one minute by your side. Fuck it. I don’t care if your feed your kid baby formula or Kombucha tea or Spam or if you feed them the old-fashioned boob way. I just don’t care. I don’t live your life, so why would I?

Let’s all raise our collective mom voices together and say, Fuck it, we are all women and mothers and we are all doing the frickin’ best that we can.

Let’s be friends and fellow team-mates in this thing we call motherhood.

Please come to me when you are sad and shaken by motherhood, as we all are at one time or another. I shall hand you a glass of wine, if you are one who partakes, and just listen. I won’t try to solve it. I will just listen and nod in understanding of one who has been there, too.

Even though I believe my child is the most amazing walking sack of DNA that ever graced the planet, I also understand that he is probably as annoying to you as your kid is to me. I get it. No hard feelings.

I won’t compete with you in my mind. And I won’t compare my child to yours at every turn. I just won’t do it. Our kids will do their own thing in their own time and it really has nothing to do with us.

I will know that when you are screaming at your child helplessly in the grocery store that you have every reason and right to do so. Whatever it is that brought you to that point was as crazy as what brought me to the point of screaming at my own children in the sick room at the hospital that one day. I will remember this and empathize and give you a thumbs up.

I won’t judge your decisions in how to parent your child. I don’t know that kid like you do and I never will. I will mind my own business because if I judge, it is more about the insecurity I feel in my own decisions. I will remember this always.

I will lend a hand to mothers in need. We are all mothers and at one time or another we will all need other mothers. Whatever form that need comes in, if I have it to give, I will give it. An ear, a meal, a grocery trip, a hug, a beer, a laugh, a road-trip, a sob session, a text, duct tape, whatever.

I will put myself on your side. And not on the opposite side. As women and mothers, we are the only ones that know how each of us feel. How that overriding love for our offspring makes us a little crazy sometimes. How our ovaries are sometimes tricky bastards and our hormones make us want chocolate. Our kids don’t get it. Our partners don’t always get it. So we have to stick together in this whole motherhood thing.

Let’s just put down all of these annoying arguments; working vs. non-working, breast-feeding vs. bottle-feeding, circumcising, sleep-training, punishment giving, organic vs. non-organic, potty-training, home-birthing vs. hospital birthing, stuff vs. not stuff, give ‘em the reins vs. reins them in.

And then let’s burn these arguments. Burn them with our understanding that these are just little imperfect human beings that we are raising. They aren’t, in fact, a fragile alien species that require perfect parenting.

These kids will survive all of our good and bad decisions. We will shape them or we won’t. But maybe if we are a little more understanding of each other, we can instill that one important thing upon them.

And then the internet can be used for what it was intended for; looking at pictures of cute cats and making fun of celebrities so we can feel better about ourselves.

Are you in?

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