I was reading my daughter one of those fairy tale nursery rhyme books, when she turned to me wide-eyed and said, “When I’m a mommy, I’m going to be exactly like Shimmy’s mommy.”
When I was young and dumb, I thought that my twenty-minus years of life experience made me smart enough to conceptualize all the world’s theories with my quick, incisive judgments. It was then that I knew that the world’s mothers are classified in two groups: good mothers and bad mothers.
My early definition of a good mother existed only in fairytales. A good mother served chocolate and chew-chews for breakfast, lunch, and supper; she never made her kids take baths; and she always allowed them to play with their toys for hours without end. Of course, I was convinced that I would be the one to break the world’s record and earn a special honorary title in the Guinness Book of World Records as World’s First Good Mother. I just knew how all the world’s kids would clamor around me and beg me to take them home with me.
However, as I grew a little older and wiser, I decided that my qualifications for a good mother had been a bit too discerning and perhaps even a trifle too imaginative for my own children’s good. And so, I decided upon new parameters that would define a good mother. Every year, the must-have credentials switched a bit, most probably based upon the traits I observed in my friend-of-the-year’s mother or my need-of-the-year as a daughter. Among the credentials, a good mother had to allow her children to go to sleep past nine o’clock, buy her children as many sets of stationery as their hearts desired, and bake three-tiered birthday cakes to crown gala surprise birthday parties. A bad mother forced her kids to finish their spinach, didn’t let them cross an avenue on their own until they were at least eight years old, and forced them to make their beds in the morning.
Alternatively, as a teenager, I knew that a good mother gives her kids a cell phone, showers them with tons of compliments, and gives them space — a lot of space. A bad mother yells, imposes curfews, and criticizes. She also doesn’t buy her children new robes if their old ones are in perfect condition, but slightly outdated.
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