yes, i’m mom. ENOUGH.

To say the cover of this week’s Time magazine is provocative would be an understatement:

When I saw the photo, I sighed. I get that extreme parenting makes headlines and sells magazines, but I’m so tired of this worn-out song. Look at this model mommy – she looks like a million bucks AND practices attachment parenting like a pro! She probably even got to shower this morning! SHE WINS!

But beyond the titillating cover shot, the headline is what bothers me most: “Are You Mom Enough?”

Demanding, defiant, pushy, probing – it’s exactly the kind of gut-punch-to-insecurity question that drives me nuts about today’s treatment of parenting in the media. Enough with the mommy wars, enough with the attachment parenting debates. Parenting is not a competitive sport. It’s not a test to be aced or a contest to be won.

It’s a relationship – a way of being with others in the world. It’s a calling – a lifelong commitment. It’s a leap of faith – a journey we start without knowing how it will end.

I am a mom. A pretty new mom. Equal parts clueless and hopeful. I make a lot of mistakes, but I want to learn. I love my kids fiercely.

I think that’s enough.

While parenting shouldn’t fall prey to the self-esteem movement either - everyone gets a trophy! - it deserves to be treated as a complex, challenging calling. No theory will neatly solve its dilemmas, no ideology will produce perfection, no single decision will promise success. In fact, I wish we could banish “perfection” and “success” from our parenting discussions entirely. My inner critic doesn’t need any more help; does yours?

We’re called to be faithful parents, not successful ones.

Faithful parents keep their children’s best interests at heart and work hard to make choices that will speak to their changing needs as they grow. They stay true to their kids, not a theory or an expert.

Faithful parents know they need partners in parenting, and they find the help they need to raise their children: friends, family, doctors, nurses, teachers, day-care providers and babysitters. Faithful parents seek out community so they don’t have to go it alone.

Faithful parents try to forgive themselves for their shortcomings and forgive their kids for being human, too.

Faithful parents learn that they can’t do everything, but they can do enough.

In two days we’ll celebrate motherhood. Biological, adopted, foster, step, grand, and “other.” Flip through Mother’s Day cards at Hallmark and you’ll see this beautiful diversity: women who are faithful to the children in their lives, regardless of relationship. None of those cards are about success. None of our mothers “won.” But they were faithful. And that is enough.

Are you mom enough?

You, with your insecurities and doubts and fears? But your fierce, faithful love for the children in your life?

Yes, you are. Enough.

what if we had a mommy war and nobody came?

Several parenting blog posts recently went viral among my Facebook friends.

First there was Glendon’s cry to not carpe diem and to soak in the kairos moments. Then the Huffington Post offered “Apologies to The Parents I Judged Four Years Ago” about one mother’s conversion from harsh critic to sympathetic insider.

In Catholic circles, Simcha’s encouragement to the mother with only one child was shared and reshared. As was the stay-at-home-mom blues.

But as post after post popped up on my friends’ walls, I noticed one thing. Only the new mothers were sharing them.

Moms with babies, toddlers and preschoolers leapt on these stories – of being real, of encouraging each other, of stopping the cruel judgment. But the moms I know with grade-schoolers, high-schoolers and beyond? Silent.

Did they not need the same reminder to play nice? Was the battle no longer theirs? Did they simply stop caring?

As someone swept up in the worries of new parenting, I found myself floored by this obvious fact. All the wise and experienced moms I knew seemed to have risen above the mommy wars, while my friends were firmly entrenched in the fight.

When would I, too, reach the place where I was confident enough in my own parenting to let all my silly insecurities go?

All the arguments over how we bear and birth and feed and clothe and teach young children – they’re meaningful to the extent they help us figure out how to take our first few steps in this strange new land called Parenthood. But once we’ve learned how to walk, we’re no longer concerned with bickering over breastfeeding vs. formula.

Because, as this wise and witty blogger describes, little of it matters in the long run.

I often find comfort in the fact that whenever I ask my own mother, over a panicked phone call, if any of her five kids did x or didn’t do y, I always get a pause and then the same light-hearted response: I don’t really remember!

During my first few months as a mother, I simply could not believe this was true. How could my mom have possibly forgotten the Life-Altering Transformation That Is Getting Your Baby On A Nap Schedule or Starting To Feed Your Child Solid Foods or Diagnosing That Strange Childhood Rash?

But now that we’re on baby #2 and seem to have lost any knowledge we thought we gained with #1, I completely understand how it happens.

I barely remember the days, only a few short years ago, when my first was a baby. Now my new obsessions are potty training and preschool, not naps and nursing. With the questions and concerns that arise at every new stage, we lose the worries of the last.

Which underscores the truth that ultimately, most of the daily dilemmas don’t matter. Each human being turns out to be a mysterious mix of nature and nurture, impossible to predict, define or control.

But when we’re taking our first few toddling steps into the world of raising children, we have no idea what we’re doing. We’re bumbling along, trying to make the best decisions with little experience and lots of anxiety – a perfect recipe for insecurity. So even when we try not to trash-talk other parents, the cruel beast of judgment sneaks in and rears its ugly head.

We roll our eyes. Snicker behind others’ backs. Share juicy gossip of “you won’t believe this…” with our spouse over dinner. I’ll admit to it. I bet you’ve done it, too. But for what gain?

In a season of life when the mommy wars are still raging around me, I wonder about peacemaking. At the heart of the Gospel is a call to make peace. Beyond passive observers or angry protesters, what would it mean to be a peacemaking parent among parents? To actively build up instead of tear others down?

I know that I want more peace and less anxiety around my parenting, and I imagine most new parents are in the same boat.

So I’m throwing it out there:

The next time someone invites you to a mommy war – through their gossip or email or jokes or judgment - try not showing up.

Instead, wonder about what it means to be a peacemaker.

Take a stand against pettiness and pride. Give the other person the benefit of the doubt. Try compassion or empathy. Picture yourself as an older, wiser parent and imagine the better perspective you’d bring with more confidence.

Because wouldn’t it be lovely to live a world of parenting peacemakers? To be at peace? To teach our children the same?

What if they threw a mommy war and none of us came?

ash wednesday: every parent’s nightmare

Last night I lingered in a long line of blinking tail lights to turn into the parking lot. I wondered about the growing crowds at each year’s Ash Wednesday services. What packs the pews this evening every Lent?

As I waited, I thought of four young girls killed in a weekend car crash. Freshmen roommates, victims of a mild winter’s rare snow storm. One was from our town. Another was our sitter’s co-worker. Shiny senior portraits show girls on the brink of adulthood, bright-eyed and smiling. Lots of ashes at their loss.

I looked around at faces, young and old, as I entered the church. Many at Mass knew and loved those girls. What does Lent mean when we’re staring at death?

Before I left home that evening, my husband had told me a story he’d heard about the American reporter killed in Syria. The night before she died in the bomb blast, she told of the suffering of women and children, often the focus of her wartime front-line reporting.

“I watched a little baby die today,” she told the BBC on Tuesday. “Absolutely horrific, a 2-year old child had been hit. They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said ‘I can’t do anything.’ His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.”

“Stop,” I cut him off before he finished telling me the story. “Stop. I literally cannot hear that.” I scooped up my own 2 year-old and squeezed his squirming limbs to my chest.

“My love,” I whispered into his hair as he wrestled out of my grasp. Overwhelmed at the thought of losing life closest to my own.

I prayed about both stories in the pew. Death close to home and far away. Parents living my worst nightmare. Mothers watching their babies blown apart, fathers sobbing at their daughters’ death. I hated to think about it. But I made myself sit with the terror of such loss.

Who doesn’t want to flip the page when they see the news? Who doesn’t want to turn their head from the TV’s wail? We shy away from the horror because it is too much for us to bear. And yet each day parents wake to our worst nightmare. Cancer. Suicide. Car crash. Overdose. Babies born too early; teenagers gone too soon.

I stared up at the cross while people shuffled forward to get their ashes. I remembered that at the heart of Christ’s story, too, stands this terrible tension. A mother holding her dead son’s body.

We have to sit with this image, this terror and sorrow. And not only on Good Friday, the day of death that makes us squirm so uncomfortably in the pews. But also Ash Wednesday. Ashes on our foreheads, burnt and smeared, remind us that we each will meet death. Even the young and the lovely among us.

A family filed down the aisle in front of me. In the mother’s arms was a tiny girl with blond curls. She, too, was marked with dark ash. What did her mother see when she looked down at the sweet face smeared with soot? A reminder of her child’s mortality? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Why do so many people come back to church this night? Perhaps because Ash Wednesday helps us make sense of life’s fragility. We ritualize our own mortality to remind us to turn from sin to life-giving love.

Ash Wednesday gathers us together as a church and reminds us that our community cares about the deepest realities of our lives. It gently leads us to the edge of our fears and shows us a way to live through the suffering. It shakes us loose from the clench of loss and speaks truth of rising after dying.

A stranger smudges soot on our skin, and the traces tickle our nose. Teenagers elbow each other and snicker at the size of each others’ crosses. Wide-eyed children peer over their parent’s shoulder, innocent of the dark sign they now bear on their forehead, as mortal as the rest of us.

This sacramental sign holds us in tensions we’d rather shudder off – we’re sinful, we’re mortal, we’re human – and transforms them from terrifying to something holy. Something we can hold.

If even for one night.

learning as a family: the new translation

Bet you thought I forgot about this one…

Back when the new translation of the Roman missal was front-page news, I wrote about my struggles in coming to terms with the change. I celebrated words I loved and would miss. And I promised I’d turn to what I could embrace in the new prayers at Mass.

And then life – and work and holidays and travel and illness and everyday chaos-with-kids – interrupted. And I never got to that third post, the hopeful one. Despite its persistent nagging at me every time we slid into the pew on Sunday.

But as the weeks passed and I guiltily thought of how I hadn’t made good on my promise, I started to see that perhaps it was better this way.

I needed time for the new words to bounce off my ear, roll off my tongue, rattle around in my head. I needed space to accept the awkwardness of “chalice” instead of “cup,” “consubstantial” instead of “one in being,” “was incarnate” instead of “born.”

I needed to grumble a bit. I’ll always miss “protect us from all anxiety,” among others.

I needed to stumble a lot. I still mangle the “enter under my roof” prayer every single Sunday.

And through my grumbling and stumbling, I came to realize something important about the new words we now say and pray at Mass each week:

We are learning them together.

It’s rare for a whole family to learn something brand-new. Usually the expert teaches and the novice learns. But as a young family in today’s Catholic Church, we find ourselves in the unique position of learning right alongside our children.

At this point I don’t know the words of the Mass any better than my toddler. We both scramble for pew cards: he pretends to read them, I pretend to memorize. He chimes in on the creed; I jump in late to stutter ”and with your spirit.” We each make mistakes, and what can we do but smile? We’re learning as a family. Adults and children alike, back to the beginning together.

Our kids will never know anything but this Mass. For a while that brought me sadness. I liked the words I knew and I didn’t like the reasons behind the change. But now I find myself turning to hope, because that is our Christian calling. I hope that my children will come to love church: listening to Scripture, breaking bread, going forth to serve. I hope that our praying together as community will both comfort and challenge our family. And I hope that my wrestling with the new translation will give my kids a glimpse of what it means to be Catholic.

Our faith is beyond words. It is lives given in love and service to God and each other. You can call that by a thousand different names, but it remains truth. And yet all we have are words – imperfect, human words – with which to pray and wonder and celebrate and question. So without further ado, here are a few of the new words I’m learning to love.

We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory, Lord God, heavenly King, O God, almighty Father. The words of the Gloria have been inverted. We used to address God first (“Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father”) and state our praise second (“we worship, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory”). But now we explode into this exultation of verbs – praise! bless! adore! glorify! give you thanks! – which crescendos into an explosion of God’s names. I love the build-up of phrases, heaping glory upon glory.

I also celebrate, here and elsewhere in the Mass, the change from “worship” to “adore.” More loving, more intimate, “adore” reminds me of the way I love my husband and my boys: with such sweet joy I can’t help but grin. I like the reminder to love God like that, too.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right and just. We used to respond to the priest’s opening of the Eucharistic Prayer by saying, “It is right to give God thanks and praise.” Which I always liked. Except that the addition of the word “just” has brought echoes of justice into the liturgy. We need more words that call us to justice, so I’ll take this small step.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I can’t be the only faithful feminist out there who noticed that every “he” in the Creed which referred to the Spirit got replaced with “who”? Probably not the translators’ intention (ha!), but I celebrate it nonetheless. I love Spirit as Spirit – creative, powerful, life-giving, beyond-gender Spirit – so I secretly delight in stringing together clauses of “who.” Leaves a little to mystery and imagination, which are the root of faith.

I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. At the end of the Creed we used to say, “We look for the resurrection of the dead,” which for me evoked images of running around the house, searching for my keys (“What are you looking for?” “THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD! I CAN’T FIND IT ANYWHERE!” “Well, where did you last see it?”)

One directional adverb later, and suddenly I switch from scanning the horizon to focusing on the attitude with which I search. I look forward: I anticipate, I hope, I eagerly await. I like looking forward to things – Christmas, birthdays, my youngest child sleeping through the night - much more than I like looking for my keys. So Amen to moving forward.

How about you? What words of the new translation are you coming to love?

(And does anyone else just love the new Mass settings we’re singing? All praise to those liturgists who slogged through tangles of translation to create beauty out of unfamiliar territory. Our parish’s settings of the Hosanna and the Mystery of Faith are simply gorgeous – I’ll have to find out the composer and note it here…)

the gift of other-mothers

The package was ripped apart the instant I told S it was for him.

“What’s dat?” he asked, cocking his head to one side as he clenched in his chubby fist the silver cross he’d found inside.

“That’s a cross for you and your brother from Aunt G!” I smiled, delighted at the surprise. A treasure from her trip to Rome, the cross draws the Trinity together in a lovely and unusual pose.

But before I could wax eloquent on the nature of the Triune God, he raced across the kitchen dragging the cross along the cabinets, leaving a jagged silver line I then spent twenty minutes scrubbing off.

Later that night, S proudly slammed the cross against the wall at his height when I asked him where he’d like to hang it. “Right ‘dere,” he proclaimed.

A week later he and I were sharing an afternoon snack when F brought the mail inside. “Look who sent you a letter!” he exclaimed. When I saw the return address was the convent, I tore it open with a toddler’s enthusiasm.

“S, it’s a letter from your godmother! A real, live letter!” (From the postulant who only gets to send one letter a month, this was no small surprise.) I soaked in her words with February sunlight streaming over my shoulder. Such a gift, especially her words of love for her godson and his baby brother.

My boys are blessed with family near and far who adore them. But every so often, I’m reminded of how blessed they are to be loved by friends who aren’t even related. By their other-mothers.

Many of us had one growing up. Maybe a parent’s college roommate or a family friend without kids of her own. Women who embraced a role of nurturing that went beyond biology or blood ties. We called them “aunt,” and over the years they became a part of the family. They took us seriously, and we basked in their affection. We couldn’t imagine growing up without them.

This article - which in a God-incidence arrived on our doorstep the very same week as mail from the other-mothers – calls them PANKs: professional aunt, no kids. No matter the moniker, their role in children’s lives is real and important. They widen the family circle, stretch the boundaries of love, and broaden the tent of the village that raises the child.

Thanks to my babies’ many other-mothers – best friends from college, dear friends from grad school – they will know a world that is bigger than our family’s ways. And for their growing in faith, this is of utmost importance.

The two dear friends who blessed us with surprises in the mail this week could not be more different, or more dear to my heart. One reminds my boys to pray the rosary; the other reminds them to seek Christ in the margins. One other-mother Marches for Life; one marches on the School of the Americas. Through these two women who wrestle with their callings in vastly different ways, my boys will be loved into a faith that is more active and contemplative, more liberal and conservative, more vibrant and colorful than anything their two parents could show them alone.

As more women choose paths other than motherhood, perhaps the ranks of PANKS will swell. While I know many in their number mourn the loss of their own parenting experience, I also honor what their presence can mean for children who crave role models. The power of positive adult influences in a young person’s life cannot be underestimated.

Tonight I see a cross on the wall and a letter on the table. I think of a quilt in the nursery and a picture of Jesus on the shelf. Gifts to my children from their aunts-by-love, signs of the real presence of other-mothers in our home.

Their devotion to our boys is their true gift. They who do not deal with tantrums or teething or toilet training can cherish the heart of a child with a pure love, unfettered by the daily drain of parenting, much like the adoration of grandparents or the fierce loyalty of uncles.

It’s a good reminder that we’re all called to care for children who are not – by blood or bond – “our own.” Because they are still our own.

As any cherished aunt will tell you.

Women without children are also the best of mothers, often, with the patience, interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot often sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts.

Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parents, by another adult.

- Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year

the old translation: what i will miss

The Catholic Church in the U.S. is on the cusp of change. Starting on Sunday, the new translation of the Roman Missal will go into effect, and all of us in the church – from pastor to pew – will begin learning new prayers and responses.

Last week I wrote about my need to grieve the loss of the well-loved words I won’t hear anymore, in order to turn and embrace new words. So today I give you a few of the changes that I’ll leave behind with longing…

[Words in bold are the part of the old translation that will be changed.]

We believe in one God…

I know that by definition, the “credo” of the creed means “I believe.” Yet I can’t help but miss how it feels to stand in a full church, shoulder to shoulder with family and stranger, and declare what we as a people hold true. Especially in a world as divided and contentious as ours, there is something powerful about proclaiming the truths that a wide and diverse group holds as sacred. We are liberal and conservative, we are practicing and lapsed, we are certain and unsure, but we all stand together and share the beliefs that make us church.

…by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

The loss of “born” (in favor of “was incarnate”) is one that I especially grieve. I love the moment in the creed when we bow in reverence of Jesus’ conception and birth, not only because it honors the wonder of the Incarnation but because it honors Mary’s role in God’s great plan. Ever since the births of my own babies, I have barely been able to speak the words of how Jesus was “born of the Virgin Mary” without a lump in my throat. To learn all that bearing and birthing a baby demands from a woman, to have lived through the pain and the power of those moments – I felt that I was honoring Mary and her strength every time I prayed those words of the creed.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Powerful and poetic, simple and succinct. Yes, there are many ways to proclaim the mystery of our faith, but I’m saddened that I’ll never hear these three phrases prayed in the Mass again. They always reminded me of the constancy and consistency of Christ: everywhere and always, in time and beyond time, past/present/future.

Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

At a family wedding years ago, I overheard the guest behind me whisper to her date right after the assembly prayed these words before Communion. “That is my favorite part of what Catholics say at church,” she said. “I don’t really get what they’re saying a lot of the time, but I love that part – ‘I’m not worthy to receive you, but I shall be healed.’”

I never forgot her words, how she recognized the power of humility and certainty of faith, all wrapped into one. At times in my life, I didn’t feel worthy to receive – but I could, so I did. Unworthy but grateful and hopeful – and therefore worthy in ways I couldn’t see. I know that the change to “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof” is more Scripturally sound, but I mourn the loss of the intimacy of simply saying “receive you.”

These are just a few of the changes come Sunday, words that will pass from everyday use into the history books. But they are words that shaped my faith, prayers that guided me through dark moments and showed me glimmers of light. Maybe it’s not too dramatic to say that losing them is like losing an old friend. Because words matter. And we loved the ones we lost.

What words will you miss?

wrestling with the new missal (because words matter)

Life is full of firsts and lasts. But sometimes even when we see change looming on the horizon, it’s no easier to accept.

This weekend is the last Sunday of the Catholic Mass as I’ve known it since I was a child. Starting on the First Sunday in Advent, a new missal translation will go into effect. And as a church, we’ll go from flying through rote memorization to stumbling over new words and prayers in the pews.

I am not looking forward to this.

The changes are no surprise. They were in the works when I graduated from divinity school, and all the liturgy students were a-twitter about new Mass parts and catechizing the changes. But with such drama and politics and ups and downs about how when (and even whether) the new translation would be put into place, I did what any wordsmith faced with the prospect of drastic change in well-loved prayers would do.

I ignored it.

I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. I hoped it would get caught up for years – or even decades – with bishops bickering or committees quibbling. I prayed that the Spirit would move the church to invest its energy in debates other than “consubstantial” vs. “one-in-being.”

And – surprise! – it turns out that this was a foolish way to go. Because just like denying that your baby is growing up or your teenager is heading off to college, the change was coming. Whether I liked it or not.

So for the past few weeks, I’ve been moping around Mass. As our choir started singing the new Gloria in preparation for Advent, I frowned. As the bulletin grew fat with inserts about relearning the Mass parts, I grumbled. As priests preached from the pulpit about the coming changes, I sighed.

And then on the drive home from church one Sunday, I got that unmistakable itch. The uncomfortable restlessness that means God is speaking and I’m not listening.

Dang, I hate that itch.

I realized that I needed to figure out a way to embrace the change. To see good. To find peace. Because change was coming and I’d have to live with it.

So I sighed and pulled out a stack of papers that I’d stuffed in a drawer. A copy of the changes to the Mass parts. A list of FAQs about why this is happening now. Commentaries on the meaning of the new translations.

I sat down and read them all. And decided that if I had any hope of embracing the new, I first had to grieve the loss of what was old and comfortable.

Before you roll your eyes – it’s just some new words! who cares? does it really matter? - let me remind you that anyone who dares to call themselves a writer, even in the most amateur use of the term, believes that words matter. That beauty and poetry matter. That the power of words to shape our thoughts and beliefs matters.

And because I believe words matter, when I finally sat down and faced the new words right in front of me, I discovered – surprise! – that I actually appreciated some of the changes. If I could lovingly let go of the past, I might just be able to peacefully accept the future.

So this week and next, I’m going to spend some time on both sides of the changes. One post on what I will miss from the old translation and one post on what I can embrace in the new.

If you’re Catholic, I hope this sparks a new wrestling with the words on the page. Because words matter. And if you’re not, I hope this inspires a new reflection on what you profess and believe. Because words matter.

As any parent of a frustrated toddler will patiently remind you, you have to use your words. And use them well. My prayer for our church as we push into this period of transition with translation is that we can use our words and use them well.

Because words matter.

on guilt, growing up, and (ira) glass

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re happily reading some mildly interesting article, when all of a sudden – WHAM-O! – the expert or the study or the news smacks you with The Finding That You Should Have Known And Now Means You Have Completely Failed At A Major Portion Of Your Life.

Case in point. Yours truly was idly surfing through the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, generally equal parts interesting-news-articles and opinionated-Manhattan-mommies-up-in-arms about the latest parenting buzz. And being the parent of a child who occasionally expresses his disdain for my insufferable rules by wailing at the top of his lungs, I clicked on this post: Seeing Tantrums as Distress, Not Defiance.

So there I was, all innocently reading about toddlers’ inability to self-regulate their emotions and how parents need to lovingly guide them through this challenging phase. When I got to this line:

Dan Siegel, author of the “Whole Brain Child,” gave me the science behind this. “During those early years, the ability to coordinate and balance your own subcortical source of emotion is dependent on a caregiver’s response to you,” he said. We freak out, they freak out. Our ability to stay tuned in to them literally helps their brains grow.

WHAM-O! And the whole room slants. My (now fully developed) brain screams, “I KNEW IT! I LOSE MY TEMPER AT MY TODDLER’S TANTRUMS AND NOW I HAVE PERMANENTLY SCARRED HIS BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND HE’S GOING TO BECOME A SOCIOPATH!!! COMPLETE AND UTTER PARENTING FAIL.”

Ah, parental guilt. It bursts into a calm mother’s mind as quick and sudden as a newborn’s wail, and it lingers in her heart as long and pitiful as a toddler’s whimpers.

Before calling child protective services on myself, I thankfully went back and read the entire article again, only to find that it wasn’t as drastic and dramatic as all that. In fact, it might actually help me handle tomorrow’s tantrums with a bit more love and grace. (Maybe.)

But the memory of that flash of mommy guilt lodged itself in my brain and wouldn’t let go.

I remembered other sinking feelings from my first year of parenthood. Doctor’s appointments when I feared my baby wasn’t hitting every single developmental milestone. Parenting magazines whose glossy photos celebrated children who neither slept, napped, or ate like mine. A fellow mother in a “baby & me” class who actually uttered the words, “I just can’t believe how easy this has been!” in response to the question of the biggest surprise of motherhood. (I’m still surprised that my unshowered, bleary-eyed, anxious, hormonal self didn’t lunge across the circle of newborns to strangle her.)

Motherhood brings with it a new and special kind of guilt. A guilt that screams to your deepest fears and insecurities. A guilt that terrifies you into thinking you are not only making a mess of your life, but a brand-new person’s as well. A guilt that rears its ugly head just when you think you’ve cobbled together some kind of confidence about the whole raising-a-kid thing.

Along the way, I’ve learned to handle the outbursts of guilt with slightly more finesse. The second year of parenting brought with it the ability to forgive myself for being a decidedly imperfect mother. And the third year has dawned with daily reminders that since the many ways I supposedly failed my first child did not – it appears thus far – ruin him for life, I may actually be able to successfully help raise a second.

But I still feel the mother guilt on an all-too-regular basis, as I imagine many of you do, too. How can we help it? We want to raise our children well, and when we start out, we have no clue how. Fertile soil for the rapid growth of guilt, if I ever saw it.

So when I came across this delightful bit from Ira Glass, I was cheered. Not only because I love his wry voice and his quirky story-telling, but because his wisdom speaks to me as both a hopeful writer and a hopeful mother.

Ira reminds me that we can’t help but start off frustrated in the early years of any good work we’re trying to do. We have a grand vision of what we’d like it to be – the family we’d like to have, the book we’d love to write – but the daily slog often falls far short. Many days we want to throw in the towel and declare we’re beat. But when we stick it out and make ourselves keep going, we start to close the gap between hopes and reality. We find that we might actually have a chance of becoming the parent – or writer or artist or minister or teacher – that we dreamed we could be.

Nobody tells this to beginners, Ira says. And maybe they should. So the more we remind ourselves – and each other – that most everybody goes through this, the easier we’ll be able to breathe. And perhaps the guilt, or the fear of failure, or the frustration of not living up to our high hopes, can even spur us on to more than we dreamed in the first place.

It takes a while. It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that.

on babies, tv, and praying-as-we-ought

As soon as I read the headline, I grabbed the phone and called F at work.

“So do you feel vindicated now?” I asked, laughing.

‘Second-hand TV harmful to babies,’ the newspaper proclaimed. And all I could think of were the many football games we watched during the fall when S was an infant.

F was adamant that the baby not watch TV. So he would turn the child’s head, shield his face, or swoop him out of the room entirely if the action onscreen captured his attention. I would just laugh or roll my eyes – it wasn’t like we plopped the kid in front of the boob tube all day long, after all – but F was unwavering in his stance.

And now here was the high holy court of the American Academy of Pediatrics, coming down on the side of my paranoid spouse.

No TV, the experts insist. Not one minute for the under-two crowd. Not even a grown-up show in the background while the parent plays with the child. Even the slightest background exposure impacts babies’ sensitive, growing brains.

But what struck me most about the article was this line:

The new academy recommendation toughens up some of the most-ignored medical guidance in the nation.

An estimated 90% of parents let their kids younger than 2 watch television (an average of 1-2 hours daily), even though presumably a good number of them have heard the AAP’s strict prohibition. And at first I was alarmed by this: why are so many parents disregarding scientifically-backed advice? Why is it ok to ignore this guideline but not others?

But then I made a correlation. What person of faith doesn’t know that they’re supposed to pray? A lot. Every day. Without ceasing, even. And yet I’d be willing to bet that about the same amount of us – 90% or so – don’t. We may want to, we may try to. But life intervenes, we forget, we fail.

So what’s the solution? Do we berate parents for exposing their children’s impressionable minds to TV? Do we guilt people from the pulpit for not praying enough?

I don’t think so. I think you first have to ask why people do what they do.

As the article points out, parents let their babies and toddlers watch TV for a number of reasons. They need to keep them occupied while they make dinner. They think it’s educational. They want to make their children happy. They just need a few minutes of peace and quiet after a long and crazy day. Or they just don’t know it might be harmful.

Likewise, why don’t most of us devote more time to prayer? We’re tired. We’re distracted. We’re busy. We don’t feel think we know how. Or we just don’t think it’s that important.

I believe that, in most cases, you have to give people the benefit of the doubt. And then with respect and compassion, invite them to consider another way. Like all the things our kids can do instead of watching TV. Or simple steps to weave prayer into our daily lives.

People don’t need more guilt. And adults don’t need to be chastised. But we all need encouragement and gentle reminders, even to follow advice that we know is good for us.

And the one we claim to follow was pretty good at this himself, it seems.