I Thought Good Mothers Were in Control

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Parenting hasn’t been an easy journey for me or my children. It has been wrought with judgment.

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Trying to go anywhere with seven children in tow and not be noticed was next to impossible. I felt like Mother Goose with her seven goslings waddling behind her. It wasn’t often that all seven were actually behind me. Maybe I was pregnant with one. Maybe one was on my hip. Maybe an older one was in juvenile detention, a psychiatric ward, or a boys’ home.

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Parents are judged. We are judged by other parents, people who aren’t parents yet, our own parents, our children, our children’s friends, teachers, social workers, neighbors, authority figures, and random people passing us in Walmart. There is really no escaping it. There is no level of parenting perfection—or even the appearance of perfection—that guarantees no one will have an opinion about what you’re doing.

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If I waited until all of my children appeared successful before I told my story, I would never tell it. I know that when I write about my parenting journey, someone will think I should have done something differently.

 

Someone will believe I should have known better, tried harder, left sooner, stayed longer, disciplined differently, protected differently, loved differently.

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I know because I used to judge other parents, too. Harshly.

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By the time I had child number four, I realized that nearly every parenting behavior I had once classified as evidence of a “bad mother,” I had eventually done myself. I bribed children with candy in the checkout line when they pitched a fit. I brought children into public wearing dirty, mismatched clothes, bare feet, and snotty noses. I have gone into public myself wearing dirty, mismatched clothes, no bra, and slippers.

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I don’t particularly like remembering what led up to some of those days. Sometimes it was a middle-of-the-night trip to an emergency room. Sometimes a police station. Sometimes sleeping in a Walmart parking lot until it felt safe to go home.

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And still, judgment came. Why did you stay? Why didn’t you get your troubled teenagers help? Why did you keep having babies? Why didn’t you call the police?

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Eventually the loudest judgment wasn’t even coming from other people. It was coming from myself. Why didn’t I do this? Could I have done something differently? I should have seen it coming. I could have prevented this.

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For a very long time, I believed I was somehow responsible for every outcome in my family. If one of my children made a destructive decision, somewhere inside me was the belief that I must have failed to do something correctly. I thought the choices of the people I loved were determined by what I did—or didn’t do.

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And I extended that same belief to other mothers. If a woman’s children were struggling, surely there was something she should be doing differently. If her marriage was falling apart, perhaps she should fix it. If her child was out of control, she should get control.

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It took me nearly three decades of parenting to understand something extraordinarily simple:

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I am not in control of another human being. Not even one I gave birth to. Maybe especially not one I gave birth to.

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We give mothers so many labels: stay-at-home mom, working mom, super mom, self-absorbed mom, homeschooling mom, soccer mom, teen mom, neglectful mom, single mom. Every label quietly carries another category with it: what that mother supposedly is not.

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Eventually I stopped finding those labels particularly useful. I am a human being raising other human beings.

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That change in language changed something in me. Raising human beings feels very different from controlling children.

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When I was growing up—and when I was raising my first boys—I heard phrases like, “Don’t allow that,” and, “Make him do it.” There was an assumption underneath those sentences that a parent could simply decide what another person would do.

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Sometimes that appears to work, especially when you have a child who is willing to comply. Then you have a child who isn’t. A child who has very definite ideas about who he is and what he will or will not do. We often call that child “noncompliant.” Funny how, in adults, we sometimes call the very same trait independence.

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My first lesson in this came from my eldest, Avery. And it took me years to learn it because Avery and I had something important in common: we were both stubborn as hell.

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One of the great battlegrounds of our relationship was, apparently, silverware.

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Years ago, I liked things orderly. My house was supposed to be neat. Everything had a place, and that place made perfect sense to me. Especially the silverware drawer. Spoons went with spoons. Forks went with forks. Knives went with knives. Everything faced the same direction. Obviously.

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One day, when Avery was about nine years old, I told him to empty the dishwasher. And he did.

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Later, I opened the silverware drawer and discovered complete anarchy. Spoons were not spooning. Forks were scissoring each other. Knives were scattered around with complete disregard for the social order. It was mayhem. Stainless-steel lawlessness.

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This could not stand.

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“AVERY! Come here!”

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He appeared.

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“Is this how you put the silverware in the drawer?”

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“Yes.”

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Okay. Admittedly, that was a stupid question. Let’s try again.

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“Avery, do you see these slots? Forks go here. Spoons go here. Knives go here. This is how I want it done from now on. Do you understand?”

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“Sure.”

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And off he went. Problem solved.

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Except it wasn’t.

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Again and again, Avery emptied the dishwasher and put the silverware into the drawer incorrectly. Again and again, I called him back. Again and again, his play was interrupted while he angrily slammed forks, spoons, and knives into their proper locations.

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At the time, I believed I was teaching him responsibility. I was teaching him to do something correctly when asked. That was good parenting. Or so I thought.

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What I was also doing was turning silverware into a power struggle. I needed to be right. He needed to resist being controlled. And neither of us was particularly interested in surrendering.

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Years later, I was standing in my kitchen on a weekday morning. It was around seven o’clock. One side of the sink was full of dirty dishes. The other side was stacked with clean ones. I asked my twelve-year-old son if he could finish the dishes before I got home so I could start supper right away. I began quickly putting away some of the clean dishes myself.

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Then I grabbed a handful of wet silverware, opened the drawer, and tossed the whole mess inside. And stopped.

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I remembered Avery.

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I remembered how important neatly nested silverware had once been to me, and how completely unimportant it had been to him. Now, suddenly, it wasn’t important to me either.

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Avery was no longer here, but that stupid silverware drawer was. And so was the memory of all those little battles and all that energy spent insisting there was a correct way to put away a fork. I had needed to be right, and now I couldn’t even remember why.

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Sometimes I organize the silverware. Sometimes I throw it in the drawer. I don’t judge it anymore.

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That moment made me wonder how many things we pass down simply because somebody once told us there was a correct way to do them. Eat everything on your plate. Make your bed every morning. Sit still. Stop fidgeting. Do your homework immediately after school. Read for fifteen minutes every night. Be polite. Stop crying. Because I said so.

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Some of those things can be useful. Some may even be beneficial. But I began asking myself a different question: Does this need to become a battle?

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As a teacher, I know that fifteen minutes of reading each night can be beneficial. But I also know something else now. A mother sitting beside her child believing she has failed because they didn’t read that night isn’t necessarily helping either one of them.

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For years, I carried enormous amounts of guilt about what I did or didn’t do as a mother. Looking back, much of that guilt was simply judgment pointed inward. I had built an imaginary definition of a “good mother,” and then constantly measured myself against it.

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I parent differently now. I try to parent the child who is actually standing in front of me rather than the child I think should be standing there. What does this particular human being need right now? What are they asking for? What am I asking for? Can both of those things exist together?

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Sometimes the answer is easy. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes there are limits. Sometimes I absolutely have to make decisions my child doesn’t like. Being responsible for children is real.

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But responsibility and control are not quite the same thing.

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When I feel myself becoming desperate to control an outcome, I try to pause. I ask myself: What else is possible here? What am I not seeing? Is there another way through this besides forcing someone to comply?

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Sometimes an idea comes to me. Sometimes one comes to my child. Sometimes nothing changes except the energy between us. And sometimes that alone changes everything.

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The more I tried to control my children, the more resistance I often created between us. Sometimes they complied. Sometimes they rebelled. Sometimes I “won.” But looking back, I’m not sure every victory was worth what it cost us.

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I spent years believing good mothers were in control. Their children behaved. Their homes functioned. Their teenagers made good choices. Their families stayed intact. Nothing terrible happened. And if something terrible did happen, surely someone had failed.

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Life dismantled that belief for me. Painfully.

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My children are human beings. They have their own desires, their own wounds, their own personalities, their own choices, and their own lives.

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I can guide. I can teach. I can advise. I can create boundaries. I can love. I can be present. I can apologize when I get it wrong. But I cannot live another human being’s life for them.

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And maybe motherhood was never supposed to be about controlling who my children became. Maybe it was about walking beside them while they became themselves—and becoming myself along the way.

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