This is my Mom. Happy Mothers Day to her. She was kind of a "granola mom", a hippy mom, and she chose alternative parenting. Home births, breastfeeding, no vaccinations, homeschooling, homeopathics, tarot card readings, women's moon circles, taking me to buy a vibrator when I was a teen.
I love my mom, and I'm all for alternative parenting or attachment parenting. But I can't imagine that she would ever have posed on the cover of Time Magazine while breastfeeding my brother - even though he did continue breastfeeding until he was almost four years old. She just would have felt like that was something private, not to be put on a magazine cover with a provocative title like "are you Mom Enough?". For more on this, click here.
My children both self-weaned at 13 months old. Why? I don't know. Maybe I just wasn't Mom Enough.
Are the Mommy Wars real? I don't really see folks getting into fights about parenting choices face to face. But in print, or on the internet, there we go to extremes and fight. The idea that there is some perfect way to parent, or to live, just baffles me. All there is is our own human-fraility, blinding groping toward living the life that human dignity demands of us - a life of integrity in compliance with what our hearts call us to do. Or, in other words - we do what our heart instinctually tells us to do.
So, I want to wish all the Mom's a happy Mother's Day. No matter how you do it, or if you are "Mom Enough" for some, you are a Good Mother, and God Knows It's Not Easy.
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