Mom (Noun)

What is a mom?


Wikipedia: A mother is a woman who has conceived, given birth to, or raised a child in the role of a parent. Because of the complexity and differences of a mothers' social, cultural, and religious definitions and roles, it is challenging to define a mother to suit a universally accepted definition. The masculine equivalent is a father.

In other words, the definition of the word "mother" is so complex that Wikipedia can't even attempt to do it justice, and Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia. 

 Facebook is full of quizzes that promise to tell me what kind of mom I am:

The soccer mom?

The busy mom?

The over-protective mom?


Sometimes I feel like I'm a bad mom. I'm so busy, and my child keeps doing things I tell her not to do. The more I tell her not to do them, the more she wants to do them, so is the psyche of the two-year-old. And then, of course, there's the fact that the house is a mess, and at least now it is a mess because I'm in the middle of a massive re-arrangement. And if Charity is anything like me, her physical space has to be conducive for creation or her mind won't use its creative space. And nothing is more frustrating than having the tools to create and not being able to make it happen. 

Sometimes I feel like I'm a good mom. I am tasked with a great deal, and at the end of the day, I manage to have it done, or at least almost done. I take my daughter to the park and the festivals. If she wants to dance, she dances. If she wants to jump in a mud puddle, she does. I am all about freedom and natural results---most of the time. In general, I think I'm doing a good job because she always wants to be with me. 

Last week, I asked one of my students to write a poem about her writing process. This was supposed to be something simple, to get her thinking in analogies and to get her writing, but what she wrote was profound. It compared writing to relationships. One of the lines was something like, "First Drafts are like First Dates." I loved it. 


And I think being a mom is a lot like writing too. There aren't really answers. There are just choices we make in response to our situations. We just have to hope we're making the right ones.