I hope I'm a good enough mom so that my kids love me like John Mayer loves his mom. . .

Did you see John Mayer get interviewed after the Grammy's? He was calling his mom to tell her about his win. Very cute. I know my mom probably isn't the first person I'd want to talk to after I won an award. I don't think she even knew I had graduate d from law school for a couple of years.

Anyway, I wanted to follow-up with a few thoughts on the Newsweek article and upcoming book about "mommy madness." (I think the John Mayer comment will seem a little more relevant in just a little bit.) Other mom-bloggers have been writing about this article. I hope they don't mind me linking to them (hey, we all want more readers!) -- check out what citymama has to say. We all need to hear these things. Well, I did anyway. Follow her links to the Childbearing Hipster's blog as well.

I don't so much feel that my son has to go to the best preschool in town and that he needs to be involved in all sorts of activities at the tender age of almost two. But I'm always comparing my mothering to those moms immediately around me, and usually, in my own mind, I'm the one not measuring up. I don't explain things enough to Daniel. I don't try to do enough craft projects with him. (He's totally uninterested in them at this point anyway, but if I just keep trying . . .) I have the TV on too much. I don't take him outside enough. I'm not creative enough in getting him to eat different things. etc. etc.

I think we forget that we are human. We just can't do it all. We aren't going to be able to deliver the perfect childhood to our offspring. But yet, we want to -- we strive to.

Over the last ten plus years, there has been a lot of delving into one's childhood in search of the root cause of whatever persistent unhappinesses one might have in one's life. I've certainly done plenty of this. I didn't have the most pleasantest of childhoods and am afraid that I'll repeat similar things even in my attempts to avoid them. Or maybe I'll be successful in avoiding some things, but mess up in yet other ways.

And sometimes, figuring out exactly what went wrong in one's own childhood in order to avoid doing those things towards your own kids is not the easiest task in the first place. Maybe it was fairly obvious like divorce or alcoholism or abuse, or maybe it was less obvious, like water torture where one drop on it's own isn't so bad, but day after day, drop after drop, it eroded your sense of self. So how on earth can we figure out how to avoid those things with our own children if we aren't even exactly sure about what might have affected us?

The bottom line is that we want our children to be happy. We hope that they are not in psychotherapy thirty years from now trying to trace back what might not have been quite right in their childhoods. We want to give them the love and acceptance that maybe we didn't get, but we aren't perfect. Nobody's perfect. We will make mistakes. We will disappoint them in some ways. So how do you know what's good enough? I don't know.

I'm not sure, but I think that unlike so many other endeavors in our lives, parenting cannot be a goal-oriented thing. It has to be undertaken by living in the moment with our children, by engaging with them in better and in worse, not fretting about the future and what the outcome of our parenting experiment is going to be and how to get to a successful result, but just loving them to the best of our abilities, acknowledging that there will be mistakes and that everybody will learn from them. That in and of itself is a great lesson, I suppose.

But can I please be assured that they'll want to call me after winning any big awards? You know, like the Grammys, or something . . .