Hey there, you—the exhausted one who hasn’t slept for 6 consecutive hours in a month. The parent who just fed the kids chicken nuggets for the 5th time this week because they won’t eat anything else. Your shirt is dirty, your shoe is untied, you’re 2,000 emails deep in the “Unread” folder, and you’ve gotten another text from your kid’s school that homework wasn’t turned in, again.
I know you’re feeling all kinds of ways right now. It’s easy to go online and see perfect-looking parents and feel like you have never once done anything right in your entire life. Maybe that’s just me? I suspect, despite my brain’s pervasive need to belittle, frustrate, and undermine any way I might feel okay about myself as a person and a parent, I’m not alone in feeling like I’m just not measuring up.
And I can guess what you’re thinking, “But you don’t know how bad at this I am! You’re probably fine, but I’m a disaster.” And can I tell you: same. But really, we both know better, right? You have to know that while things may seem so hard right now, you’re doing great. Because if you didn’t care, even a little? You wouldn’t feel the way you’re feeling now. Good parents sometimes waste hours worrying about how they are failing their kids. It’s difficult not to feel that way, especially if you exist outside your own bubble.
Online, you can see millions of parents who make special little bento box lunches for their kids every day that are healthy and cute. Heck, they have kids that will eat healthy food at lunch without supervision. And I could feel terrible (and have in the past) about the fact I make my kids pack their own lunches because I got tired of hearing how I’d packed it wrong or they hated it. I could beat myself up about the lack of variety, the lack of care, and the general chaos that is my kids’ lunches.
But, you know what? They ate. They have a plethora of food choices available to them daily all day long. They might not like the choices. They may complain there is “no food” because we ran out of takis and fruit snacks.
It’s easy to feel bad when some of my kid’s peers are driven home in the newest model Tesla and we are driving around a beat-up van that smells like—you know what there is no defining the smell. The point being, we do not have new-car money. We do not have tropical-vacation money. So it can feel bad to hear my youngest complain that her bestie got to go on an airplane over spring break and they just got a second new car. It feels kind of awful, actually. I know material things aren’t what will make them happy or better people, but sometimes I wish I could provide all the things they’d ever want anyway.
It’s hard not to feel bad when our social media feeds are curated to dial in on our insecurities. I follow creators who make amazing art, write fantastic books, have pristine clean houses, and make beautiful, healthy, tasty meals the whole family will eat and thank Mom for. Except, the thing is. The thing is? It’s almost all fake. I know as well as anyone that a room can be picture-perfect spotless and it takes less than a minute for a kid to spill juice, a dog to knock over snacks and swipe their tail through a pile of papers and depositing them on the sticky juice-covered floor, another kid to dump out their entire backpack on the couch and turn my hours of work into a distant, beloved memory.
It is easy to feel like you’re not enough in a world full of carefully curated photos, scripted videos, and sponsored posts. It is easy to feel inadequate when people only show the best things. I mean, I’d show off too if I managed to get all 5 of my kids, my husband, and myself into clean, matching clothes and smiling at the camera (really smiling children!) and managed to get a good picture. It’s simply that the amount of tears shed over such a feat (mostly mine) isn’t worth it to me at the moment.
The truth of it is that everyone is faking it a little as a parent. Maybe they seem to have it all together but the chances are good they don’t. For example, I can pop out several thousand words a day in articles/blog posts/ personal writing projects. I plan all our meals and shop for ingredients. I keep track of all the things. My husband is an engineer. He can do the math that would break my brain. He is unbelievably smart. But he cannot write as many words in a day as I can. He needs recipes written out word for word to follow them, even ones he’s done a bunch of times. His brain doesn’t work the same way mine does. And mine doesn’t work like his. But we’re both good at what we do.
So no, I’m not ever going to have a picture-perfect, Insta-worthy parent life. I don’t have the mental space for it (or the patience). But my kids are happy (most of the time) fed (unless they refuse to eat what’s there and that’s on them) and have access to everything they need. We don’t have a lot of extra, but we have more than some. They are well taken care of and I am genuinely proud of the people they are. They don’t need perfect. They don’t even need amazing. They need parents who are present and provide the things they need emotionally and physically. And by that metric, we’re doing well. Dear parent, I suspect so are you.
