There's No Right Way to Be a Parent, but Does This Mom's List of Mistakes Go Too Far?
One afternoon when we were still living in New Zealand, I sat on the couch pretty much topless, as one is when nursing a...
Posted by Mama Lion Strong on Sunday, March 27, 2016
Whether you are a new mom or have years of raising kids under your belt, you're bound to have made mistakes along the way. One mom shared her personal list of major parenting snafus in an effort to foster a spirit of understanding and support among parents.
In her intimate Facebook post, the mother of three first recounted an incident when she was breastfeeding her newborn while her older two boys were playing in their gated backyard.
The couch faced the back deck and I had our garden doors open to the back yard. I wasn't watching TV or looking at my phone, I was just staring into space not thinking of anything in particular . . . Probably wondering how I was going to find the energy to make supper. I could see my 4-year-old son playing on the slide, but the 2 year old was out of sight — not unusual as we had a very large, gated yard.
I didn't even have time to cover myself before a woman came around the corner, a look of fury on her face and my two year old on her hip. She started yelling the second she saw me. "Do you know where I just found your child?"
By then she had glanced down and noticed my nursing baby on one side, and me fumbling with a leaky breast and a nursing bra on the other side. Perhaps she could even see the deep, dark bags under my eyes. All at once I was horrified and ashamed but praying that this woman would take pity on me. I thought, please let her see that I am already failing at life. I don't need her to tell me.
She regained her composure but instead of showing me compassion, chose to continue lecturing me. "He was on the road," she hissed. "Cars come flying over that hill and they wouldn't even have seen him! You are lucky I came along when I did."
Jen let the gravity of the situation hit her and was guilt-ridden by the thought of something happening to her child, especially an accident under her own care.
However, this wasn't the last accident her kids endured. Here, a sampling of her complete list:
- "We never figured out how he got out of the yard that day. It happened one more time, when a repairman left the gate open. That time my husband found him just as he was stepping out on the street."
- "A few months after that, my oldest son fell in the backyard and split his head open."
- "A year after that we were back living in Canada and our middle son (clearly the escape artist) was found wandering around outside in boots and a t-shirt in -20C/-4F weather."
- "Six months after that we were in a busy downtown area and I lost my oldest son. He just biked away from us."
- "A few weeks ago I walked into the kitchen and my youngest (now two) had a butcher knife in his hands and was trying to cut a block of cheese on the floor."
This mother has shared her experiences in hopes that others will meet future parenting missteps with support instead of judgment. "Next month it will be something else. Next year something else," Jen wrote. "We really don't know if one day a terrible tragedy will befall our family — because of a lag in supervision, a safety measure we forgot to take, a lapse in judgment, a child's curiosity, a teenage boy's risk. We don't know because accidents happen."
After reading this mom's list of mistakes, Facebook commenters were torn with whether she deserves their sympathy or if she should start taking responsibility. What do you think?