Theme song: Live Like a Warrior

Today's post was written by Shannon Crossman. Shannon is a beautiful writer, wise woman, and caring mother who has dared to live la vida mamacita on her own terms. Let this post wash over you like a cool and thoughtful rain. To find out more about Shannon, visit her website, ShannonCrossman.com.

Burn the Yardsticks. . .

Mother is an iconic word in the English language, one that is loaded with symbolism and implicit meaning. Simply uttering the word conjures images - good mothers, bad mothers, in between ones, too. We often use the symbolism of mother as the yardstick by which to "judge" real moms - we do it without realizing it, and the price paid is higher than you might think.

In truth, there are as many kinds of mothers as there are women in the world. We each bring something unique to the table when it comes to how we handle our kids. Yet many of us strive for these unattainable symbolic "mother yardsticks" and, in the course of doing so, batter ourselves for falling miserably short. Where is the logic in that? Has it ever helped? I ask these questions as a self-battering yardstick wielder and fellow mom. I ask because what we do to ourselves as mothers, and what we sometimes allow others to do to us, is the very definition of insanity and I think we can stop doing it. I chose to be an other kind of mother and along the way, I've learned some things that I think can help us all:

Mothering is a complicated thing - an exhausting, exhilarating, ride that never stops (no matter your proximity or non-proximity to your children).
Guilt does not have to be part of the job description and yardsticks are useless tools of suppression. It is possible to love your children fiercely and not be with them every day.
Every mom is her own unique universe. Know this to be true about yourself and it will set you, and all of us, free...

There's more, but to keep from giving you a book-length blog post, let's stop here and take a longer look at each of these points.

Mothering is a complicated thing.

So simple and so true for all moms. No matter how you mother, there are indelible threads pulling at your heart all the time. Even on the days when you consider yourself to be the worst mom ever, there is something that links you to this being who lived in your body for months before emerging into this world. No matter how aware of/disconnected from you are to that tether, it exists.

As moms, perhaps the most loving thing we can do for ourselves and each other is to practice compassion. I have to do it all the time for myself. From age 7 on, my children were primarily raised by their father (by my choice). I was always around, but in the background rather than the foreground. Which means that their primary relationship patterns, core values, and essentially who they are is more attributable to their father than to me. And that gets complicated because their father and I have profoundly different value systems. Sometimes I look at my children, whom I adore, and I don't see myself in them. I know that this is the natural outcome of my choices. Most of the time these days, I can see that without clubbing myself over the head with the yardstick, but it wasn't always like that. It took years of self-flagellation, pain, and guilt to get here. Which brings me to my next point…

Guilt does not have to be part of the job description, and yardsticks are useless tools of suppression.

Guilt is the lovely little side dish that comes along with forever measuring ourselves against the impossible yardstick of super motherhood. You know the super mom, right? She's got it all together. Never yells at her kids. Always bakes sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free cookies for her kid's class parties. Has no struggles putting a roof over their heads or food on their plates. Plays, entertains, and engages tirelessly with her children, an eternal smile plastered on her face.

I'm exaggerating, but you get the point right? The impossibility of this perfection is staggering. Real kids are delightful blessings and, at times, a colossal pain in the ass. If you've ever gone head-to-head with a willful teenage girl or been in a rush to get to work and dealt with a recalcitrant toddler who insists on putting on his own shoes even though he doesn't know how, you get me.

So, can we stop already with the guilt game? Can we burn the freaking yardsticks already? Because the truth that no one told us is, super mom is dead. We are striving after the perfection of a ghost - an ideal state of womanhood/motherhood that died on the altar of economic and social change. Not your fault, and certainly not mine. So let's set that ghost free and stop trying to be more than what's reasonable.

None of us is perfect. One day, even if you haven't experienced this yet, every mom loses it. One day we choose ourselves over our children, even if it is in small ways. Sometimes we are in difficult situations that call for us to make impossible choices. For the sake of mothers and children everywhere, can we just come to a place where we can love ourselves for the mothers we are capable of being today? And gently, gently release our choke-hold on maternal guilt? Our daughters would be so blessed if we could...

It is possible to love your children fiercely and not be with them every day.

We think that motherhood means daily presence, and for some of us it does. Yet, daily presence isn't everything. My mother was there every day until my parents divorced when I was a teenager and I have to tell you, it was hell. I'd much rather she'd been out in the world working or doing something that would have alleviated her personal misery. She might have been kinder to me as a result.

Because I'd witnessed firsthand the parenting that emerges from the shores of unfulfilled desires, I chose a different way. I was a young mom, 22 when I had twin girls. So many ideas burned brightly inside of me that had nothing to do with being a mom. I did not want to teach my children misery and martyrdom. I had no way of knowing that I would teach them other, not-so-great lessons, and I've come to understand that is part of parenting. We teach our children what is good, bad, and ugly inside us whether we want to/mean to or not. We educate them inside the sphere of our own deeply flawed humanity. There's no other way to parent. Not really.

As a mother, I missed bandaging boo-boos. I missed taking them to school every day. I didn't cook them dinner every night. I paid child support. I took them on adventures, exposed them to unusual artists, music, and spiritual experiences - even tried to take them firewalking when they were older. I showed them every day that is is possible to accomplish what other people say is impossible. I taught them how to keep moving forward in the world despite the judgement of others. I instilled strength, courage, and fierceness in them, or at least I tried.

I also, unfortunately, taught them how it felt to be 'weird' because I was not the kind of mom their friends had, and I showed them that sometimes people put themselves first in destructive ways. I am not perfect, and I no longer strive to be. My experiences taught me compassion, for myself and others. I can now see what is universally true for mothers of all stripes - we are bonded to our children - even when we cannot be with them for whatever reason. We do many things to cover over the ache and pain of separation, but none of them actually mean we love our children less.

Every mom is her own unique universe.

Probably one of the most important things I've learned to be true is that every mom is her own unique universe. Trying to compare her to an antiquated, idyllic mother structure is sort of silly. And, Sister Mothers, let me tell you it sets us up big time. Sets us up to fall endlessly short, to judge one another harshly when we have no idea what the particularities of another woman's experience are, and to suffer for the cause of motherdom. The question worth asking is, can you embrace what makes you unique as a mom? And then, can you take what you've learned about your uniqueness and embrace what makes all mothers different in their own ways?

You and I may never agree on what makes a mother a mother. You may see my day-to-day absence as unforgivable; some people do. Or you may embrace the idea that perhaps I was doing the best that I could at the time. Either way is fine. Our spheres do not have to come into alignment for us to co-exist. I am my own unique maternal world. You are, too. We each came to motherhood under different circumstances, at various ages, in diverse economic situations, and with particular histories connected to how we were mothered and how the women in our families have been mothered for centuries. Sometimes it is helpful to remember that we all carry these threads into our mothering. Sometimes remembering that there is so much more than 'just you' informing how you perform the role of mom can be an antidote to beating yourself up with an impossibly big yardstick. And the less you yardstick yourself over the head, the less likely you are to yardstick someone else.

Now that I am a grandmother, and my girls are young mothers, too, I see how imperative it is to change the way we approach motherhood. If there were one piece of wisdom I'd impart to my girls, and to all of us really, it would be this - the time has come to burn the yardsticks, or at least set them down, so that you can set yourself free to love the mother you are today.