I’m glad I’m not a perfect parent. Here’s why.
I sometimes get down on myself, thinking I should really have it more together than I do. Especially because I’m parenting book author, I tend to hold myself to unrealistic standards and beat myself up mentally when I don’t achieve that perfection. Something I’m working on this year is embracing my flaws and imperfections, partly because it’s healthier for me to do so and partly because I want my children to do the same. My older son is a lot like me, and when he falls short of his own high expectations, he can be very hard on himself. I want to model for him what grace looks like so that he can go a little easier on himself while I, too, learn to walk in grace.
At times, I wish that my children would have never seen me lose my temper or heard me yell. In The Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama says he never saw his mother’s angry face. That line stabbed me in the heart, and yet if I would have been perfectly controlled in my emotions throughout their childhoods, how would they know how to handle their own messy emotions? If I’d never yelled, I wouldn’t have been able to model making amends and repairing relationships. If I’d never felt frustration, they wouldn’t have seen me regulate my emotions and calm down. These are important skills they’ll need because even the best and most self-controlled of us aren’t perfect.
My house isn’t grand or spotless. They’ve seen me leave the dishes in the sink and the laundry unfolded in order to play or go out with our family. Sometimes I felt like I was modeling irresponsibility, but perhaps what I was really modeling was prioritizing people over to-do lists. When I look at it that way, it feels more like a success than a failure.
They haven’t had Pinterest-worthy birthday parties, and they’ve only had one big vacation. I see other moms with their annual Disney trips and matching Mickey shirts for the whole family and think my kids really drew the short straw. We’ve been to parties where everything matched beautifully and the cake was picture perfect, but the closest I got to that was the time I cut out large shapes and attempted to make Minecraft blocks and odd-looking pigs on the wall for my son’s Minecraft party. Most of the time, it’s balloons and a cake from Walmart, but you know what? Every year, they get to bust through an entire hallway of crepe paper on their birthday. Grandparents come over to spend time with them, and they get an annual birthday balloon bubble bath. When they’re all grown up, I have a feeling it won’t be the gorgeous decorations that matter so much as feeling that we loved them to pieces.
I have not walked perfectly in my faith. I sometimes feel that I’ve shorted my children by not giving them a perfect, shining example of what we believe. My children have seen me fail, but they’ve also seen me turn back toward our faith and try again. I believe there’s value in that because they, too, will stumble one day.
Brene Brown wrote a great book called The Gifts of Imperfection. She says, “Here's what is truly at the heart of wholeheartedness: Worthy now, not if, not when, we're worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As is.” I can always strive to be a better mom, but to be happy and wholehearted, I’m learning to be okay with who I am today - messy, flawed, imperfect, but totally in love with my children.