You are not alone in this battle. I am in the trenches with you. Fight on, baby mama, fight on.

I had a bad parenting moment the other day at Costco. Let's be honest, who doesn't have a bad parenting day at Costco with small children? For a child, that place is like Disneyland crack without ride lines, height restrictions or $20 burgers. This one visit, though, where I may have temporarily "misplaced" one of my 4 kids in the parking lot, reminded me of the pressures we feel as parents to be more than who we are, to be better than the sleep deprivation and round-the-clock triage we call parenting will allow. Every time I leave the general safety of my house with my kids,  I fear the fishbowl status my herd commands. We are on display for an often unforgiving and judgmental society. 

I have sought commraderie from other mothers who I would hope could share in my less-than-perfect parenting adventures, but, mothers, I have learned, can be like a pack of wolves. We are at our strongest when we stand together, but are often prone to bouts of inter-squabbling and "fur-biting"as we draw comparisons between our lives and that of others. 

I once traveled alone on plane behind a woman I had too often been: short-fused with her posse of young, inattentive children. Her middle child was asking to watch a show on the iphone, but because she'd just hit her younger brother in anger, was being denied access. She was screaming her frustration and while it would've been easy for Mom to give in, hand her the phone and pacify a plane full of annoyed, "it's going to be one of those flights" strangers, she stuck to her guns and refused the child's escalating pleas. 

As a mom to 4 vocal kids, those noises are easy for me to tune out. They are white noise and, to be fair, I was probably working on my 2nd Bloody Mary of the flight. I don't get to travel alone often. I did tune in to the commotion, though, when the guy next to me said "some people should never have children." Matt Walsh said it best in a recent blog, "parenting is the easiest thing to have an opinion about, but the hardest thing to do." Parenting will strip you raw. It's like that dream you had in High School about walking the hallways naked. That's what parenting makes you feel like every day: vulnerable and exposed. And nobody knows how to target that soft underbelly like your own children. So, we need a line of defense. We need each other as parents, as Moms to stand together against those who would judge us harshly. One of my favorite quotes from Katrina Kenison's book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, is this:

"One of the greatest challenges I've faced as a mother-especially in these anxious, winner-takes-all times-is the need to resist the urge to accept someone else's definition of success and to try to figure out, instead, what really is best for my own children, what unique combination of structure and freedom, nurturing and challenge, education and exploration, each of them needs in order to grow and bloom.”

We are taught to re-enforce good behavior in our children. As parents, we should also re-enforce it in each other...especially when well-intentioned parenting brings on the most difficult of public moments. That Mom on the plane could've caved. She could've quietly handed the phone to the child to make the screaming stop. I probably would have. In fact, I know I have. But she was stronger than I and she could've used a show of solidarity, a fist pump for her strength of character in the face of extreme social pressure to make the problem go away. So, I leaned over the back of her chair and said "You are not alone in this battle. I am in the trenches with you. Fight on, baby mama, fight on."