What Makes Someone a Great Mom?

She Was Made To Be A Mother

The world’s best Mom. We’ve all met her. You know the one, the one where you think, “I can’t stand her she is perfect at everything. The Mom that others hold up as a pillar of virtue, the Mother that prompts the saying, “She was made to be a Mother.” Do you ever wonder how she does it all so well? Then this post is for you.

I had the best Mom – everybody told me so

When I was growing up everyone thought that my family was like the one in Leave It To Beaver (I am dating myself here). My Mom got up in the morning each day and made us breakfast, she was always in a dress with her lipstick just so. Upon feeding us she would go to work and come home at lunch, make it and then go back to work. By 5:30 my whole family would be at the kitchen table having a homecooked dinner and we would have family conversations about everything and anything. My parents would slow dance in the living room on Sundays, they loved each other like crazy and they loved all of us too.

Yep, I had the perfect Mother, everybody told me so. While everyone was thinking how lucky I was, I wasn’t feeling lucky at all. My Mom was quite strict and what she and my Dad said went. There was no discussion, no negotiation, no meant no. We had chores to do every day and every weekend and we were expected to always do our best at everything we did. It wasn’t fair. Half of my friends ‘ mothers didn’t even know where they were most of the time and they never went to Parent/ Teacher night or looked at their report cards. Those were the lucky kids. They could get away with anything and they did. When I complained about my Mother people would look at me like I was crazy, but, I couldn’t help it I craved having a Mother who wasn’t so strict and wouldn’t make me do chores all the time. I wanted my Mom to be my friend and let me do as I pleased.

What Makes Someone a Great Mom

When I had a child of my own I decided right then and there I was going to be the exact opposite of my Mom. My daughter didn’t have to do chores every day, we certainly didn’t make her spend her Saturdays cleaning. My husband and I thought that her getting good grades was hard enough and that she should not have to spend her little bit of free time doing chores. I wanted to be her Mom and also her friend and to be the Mom her friends could turn to when they couldn’t talk to their Mothers. We bought our daughter all of the best things, even if meant that we would sacrifice something for ourselves. Her lunches had shaped sandwiches and I would put a special note and a joke in them every day. Being a Mom was my true calling, I loved it and was good at it. I knew my daughter was telling everyone that she had the best Mom in the world, I mean how could she not? Well, the joke was on me. My daughter didn’t think I was the best Mom in the world at all and she probably complained about me the same way that I did about my Mother.

The reality of it is this, We moms are all trying to do our best. Honestly one day we have no one to take care of but ourselves and the next we are responsible for the life of a tiny human being. They aren’t just any human being they are our human being. They came from us, so, we must know what they need. Right? Wrong. This little person is their person, they know what they like, what they need and what they want. They have a wishlist of what they would like their Mother to be and they never tell us what is on the list. So, what do we Moms do – we guess. We try something and if it works we keep doing it, if our child hates it, we try something else. The reality of it is, that it is just one big guessing game where you do everything you can and hope for the best.

Being a Mom is the one job that comes with no instruction manual, no itemized list of what to do and not to do. It is also the one job where you never get a performance review. I mean, in every other job you get a summary of what you are doing wrong and what you are doing right. As mothers, we just sit there guessing.

What if we had a performance review? A review to tell us how to be “the world’s best Mom”. We spend a moment with our children and find out what we are doing right, what we are doing wrong, and what they need from us. Often when asked they will say nothing because they are scared they will get in trouble or hurt your feelings. You need to explain that you want to be the best Mom that you can be and you need their help to do that. It can be as simple as asking what is it they love and what isn’t their favourite. The performance review can be a true life changer. Do not make it a scheduled event starting with the words, “I need to talk to you” Make it a light and casual discussion. You can’t change and give them no rules or allow them to do whatever they want. What you can do is understand their triggers, what is bothering them and what they truly need from you. It truly can be quite transformational.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes. You will be amazed, heck, you might even discover that they might want you to be like your Mother who you were trying so hard not to be.