Gimme a G!

It seems that the new year has made me want to open up my soul and bare all of my secrets in a gush of hastily typed posts. I'm not sure what's gotten into me, or why I seem to be feeding on the cathartic power of disclosing my faults, but I can't stop sharing with you the inner workings of my mind. If it gets too scary for you, just imagine what it must be like to actually be someone as unbalanced as me.

Anyway, one of the Mama blogs that I read is called Cop Mama. Anytime I feel like I'm being overwhelmed by the joys of motherhood, I think about how she spends her days enforcing the law and wrangling bad guys then comes home to raise two little munchkins of her own. Somehow having to take out the trash and unload the dishwasher doesn't seem so bad after that.

One of the things I like about Cop Mama's blog is that she does Mama Guilt Mondays. Every Monday she writes a brief little post about what makes her feel like she's not doing the best job she can do as the Mama. I love this. It's ridiculous for any mama to feel that she isn't a good mother because raising a healthy, happy child automatically raises you to Super Mom status. Yet, no matter how absurd they may be, we still have those feelings of failure for not doing enough despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. We're always comparing our choices and actions to that image in our heads of the perfect mother figure. Then we beat ourselves up when we imagine we've fallen short of that ideal.

So why am I supporting writing a weekly post outlining all the ways that we believe we've failed? Because once you've put it in black and white for the world to read it loses that hold that it has on you. You can free it and forget it instead of repeating the tired track in your head. And probably when you go back and read it in a year, you'll have a laugh over ever feeling so guilty about something so silly.

So here's my Mommy Guilt for the week. Chase has Show & Share at school, but I still haven't figured out the schedule for it. I think the reason for this is that he only goes 3 days a week so we miss the day before reminders to bring something in. So every week, the teacher goes through his backpack looking for something for him to share. Well, the only thing that she was able to find for the past two weeks was his monster toboggan. Here's a picture of it:

Which yes it's cute, but two shares worth of cute? No. So my poor kid has had to stand up and talk about this hat twice while all of the other kids probably share dollies, trains, books and trophies. All because I couldn't seem to get organized enough to send something more interesting than winter wear to school with the child. I think this may have brought about some Daddy guilt too, because when I went to put some cars in Chase's bag I found that someone had already put some in there. So either Drew put them there or my little man realized that he might need to take matters into his own hands if he doesn't want to have to talk about that darn cap again. G-U-I-L-T