You guys, the kids are fine. We are fine. We need to sturdy up a bit. The definition of great parenting is not a mother who engineers every waking moment around the whims of her kids. It is not a mom who drops all else to cater to them. It is not a parent who never, for example, throws a wooden spoon against the wall or hides in her car eating crackers while her kids search everywhere for her. It doesn’t include only the ones who never missed a single event or suffered an epic, catastrophic Mom Meltdown. That family doesn’t even exist.
We are not playing a zero-sum game here as we raise children for twenty-five years or more. As loath as I am to compare parenting to politics (forgive me, dear ones), it’s not unlike how candidates win delegates at the state level during primaries. Although it varies between parties and states, most candidates win delegates proportionally. So if they receive 65 percent of the votes, they get at least 65 percent of that state’s delegates, moving them that much closer to victory. In some cases, if a competing candidate fails to receive a minimum percentage of votes in a particular state, he forfeits all his delegates to the winning front-runner, so if he only pulled 10 percent and the minimum threshold was 15, the leading candidate receives those delegates, too, and that 10 percent simply disappears from the losing candidate’s numbers.
Stick with me: the hopefuls slog this out state by state, town hall meeting by town hall meeting, over months and miles and losing sweat and blood, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but no one state makes the entire call; it is a cumulative total of more wins than losses until they’ve secured the majority.
Mamas, if we are winning roughly 80 percent of the votes, if the majority poll involves laughter and nurture, attention and grace, presence and patience, we are winning. After all, in some cases, anything less than 20 percent falls off the map entirely; it doesn’t even register as counting. We may lose dramatically in, say, a certain season or specific disaster. We may rack up some negative numbers for a spell or lose ground during the preschool years or that one horrible junior year. But victory isn’t compromised by individual losses; it is the result of slogging it out season by season, conversation by conversation, over months and miles of sweat and blood, and the cumulative total of more wins than losses secures the role, anchors the majority, makes the history books.
As I mentioned in For the Love, my goal as a mom is to be mostly good. I may hover around 70 or 80 percent success with a 20 or 30 percent failure rate, but, if that’s enough to win the White House, it’s enough to win any house. Somehow, miraculously, the whole ends up being greater than its parts, and I know this because I’m a historian who now assesses my own childhood through the 80 percent window. Frankly, the other 20 percent is either recalled with grace and laughter or forgotten altogether, forfeiting its delegates to the winning side, having failed to meet the minimum threshold to seriously count.
And lest you are tempted to prop up my childhood as some ideal prototype, I want you to know how wonderful but regular it actually was, hitting practically none of the benchmarks of “attentive parenting” these days.
Well, we were a middle-class family who didn’t have extra anything. My parents pawned all their jewelry in 1982 so we could have Christmas presents; I don’t remember my mom (or any mom) at a single field trip or class party; we moved to four different states during my childhood (including a move in precarious eighth grade); we never flew on an airplane or took a single fancy vacation; we had crappy cars that broke down once a week; my mom went back to college when we were in elementary, middle, and high school, so we ate sandwiches for two years; all of us had in-school suspension at least once; and two of us racked up zero credits the first semester of college (unless “partying” has since become a course selection). To this day, we struggle to nurture sick spouses and children because our mom was like, Are you bleeding? Is your fever over 103? Did you puke more than once? No? Go to school.
My point is that we were ordinary. No parent catered to our every desire; no one provided artisanal vegan soap or taught us baby sign language or created “mental stimulation centers” in our playroom (we didn’t have a playroom). We moved and struggled financially and fought and failed and fended for ourselves sometimes and went to school with strep throat. And still, here we are, healthy adults who love their parents and each other, remembering childhood fondly, gratefully, tenderly. The main elements of the story were secured, and they alone lasted.
Friends, I’m challenging the metrics. I believe we can take a handful of things quite seriously as parents and take the rest less seriously, and it is all going to be okay. You are doing an amazing job. Your children know they are loved and have felt it all these years deeply, intrinsically. If we get seven out of ten things mostly right as moms, we are winning the majority, and the majority wins the race.
And when in doubt, put a few dollars back each month for their future therapy.
Mama tried.
God made us such a pretty world.
— REMY HATMAKER
CHAPTER 3
BEAUTY, FOOD, FUN, AND NAPS
A couple of years ago, I traveled to Ethiopia with a nonprofit I serve, Help One Now, and a few fellow influencers. We had an audacious goal: generate monthly sponsorships for four hundred at-risk kids to prevent imminent family disruption. It was orphan prevention. Families had to meet several criteria for sponsorship: single-parent, HIV-positive, no extended family, no job. We were serving seriously vulnerable people with zero safety nets.
Adding to this heavy work, our team drove an old van six hours a day to meet all our objectives. In rural Ethiopia. The best way I can describe this experience is by comparing it to riding a wooden roller coaster built in 1925 and missing 60 percent of its parts. We were pretty sure we were going to die any minute. You couldn’t even call what we were driving on actual roads. We were shaken and bounced and slammed half to death hour after hour, and this was all aided by no air conditioning. It was vehicular trauma.
This was serious, sober work, and we labored around the clock, spending long days in the field, then long nights at our laptops, banging the drum, rallying the troops. My mind was brimming with poverty statistics and crushing stories and injustices; our conversations centered around empowerment and reform. In the middle of this work, with my dirty hair and tired body and tortured mind, a text from a girlfriend back home snuck through the precarious web of Ethiopian cell coverage:
“Party at my pool next Friday! All our friends, no kids, and margaritas!”
First thought: Privileged American life. Gross and clueless.
Second thought: I’m gonna get a new bathing suit for this! Yay for pool parties!