Mother of the Year Award

My kids just polished off an entire bag of Hershey’s Kisses.

In the past twenty-four hours, they have also done the following under my ever-vigilant supervision: watched television, play-fought with foam swords and accidentally hit each other in the face, eaten freeze pops made with artificial colouring and flavours, and built Lego battleships designed, as they gravely informed me, to destroy entire populations of Disney characters, especially those inhabiting Mickey Mouse’s Clubhouse.

I suppose I am not going to win the Mother of the Year award today. When I was first pregnant, I read every single pregnancy book on the market, and when I finished those I started on the parenting manuals. I read everything from Babywise to The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, and I made notes in the margins. I had a binder in which I kept various informative articles and I bookmarked and combed through parenting websites. I was always an A student, a perfectionist, and I was going to ace parenthood as well.

I studied for it like I was going to be tested and of course I was. I was tested once my first child was born and I briefly considered that perhaps I was not going to get an A on this particular exam. Nonetheless I forged ahead. I regrouped and studied some more and felt successful. My first child was a fairly easy baby. It wasn’t until my colicky, sleepless second child was born, less than eighteen months after my first, that I had to face the facts: I wasn’t going to get an A.

I wasn’t going to win the Mother of the Year award. I was lucky if I just survived day-to-day operations. I didn’t have enough time in the day to sit down to eat a sandwich, let alone read about sibling relationships or potty training or infant massage to ease colic symptoms.

And that is when I learned this most important parenting lesson: you do the best you can, and you do what you need to do to get through the day. Some days that might mean that you make sidewalk chalk masterpieces with your children while they munch on organic homemade snacks, and other days your children might spend the afternoon watching videos and eating a bag of Hershey’s Kisses.

The Mother of the Year award comes with too much pressure, anyway. And not enough chocolate.