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The Truth About Motherhood Regrets

Sometimes the hardest thing to deal with in life is the “what could have been’s”, ‘what should have been’s” and “what I should have done better.”

Regrets suck.

Especially when, by the time you realize your mistake it is seemingly too late to turn back. And then the regrets become a running tape in your head on auto loop. Reminding you constantly that you messed up. Or didn’t follow through. Or didn’t take a chance.

I have had a lot of regrets and I have made a lot of decision in my life based on the wrong emotion or a twisted way of reasoning. And I have paid dearly for those decisions. I am not the only one. That is for sure. There are a lot of people that walk around talking about their past as if it were the best times of their lives because the time they are in now seems so uninspiring. And their futures seem even less rosey.

I am very happy with where I am in life now. There are some things I would go back and redo, some decisions I would reverse, but – over all – I am a very lucky woman. And I know how much I have been blessed.

That is until I get to bedtime every night and realize that my regrets about motherhood are the hardest and deepest that I have.

I should have been better about a bedtime routine. I should have done better about a consistent style. I should have been more determined to have my husband help me instead of banishing him to the room because he was too tired or too irritated to really be of help.

I could have followed the advice of other moms, taken into account their experience, their quality of advice and their heartfelt truth in sharing it. I could have done it better.

Now, I have three daughters who reject bedtime and, at the mere mention of it, spin themselves into such a fit that I can not even fathom how to handle three fits at once. The games are ridiculous and redundant, the time it takes to get them to finally lay down is a waste and the entire experience leaves me in tears almost every night of my life.

And them too. And I regret it every.single.night.

And I have no one to blame but myself. I know I should have instilled a structure that was unbreakable. Demanded the respect it takes to get them to mind without punishment, been a PARENT.

Instead, I was lax, lazy and full of excuses.

“But they are all so close together and it is hard to put all three down at once.”

Hmm.. moms of triplets do it.

“But I don’t have time to read four stories every night to all three of them!”

Seems that the three hour battle every night is more time consuming.

“It is just so much easier to let them pass out in the living room and then carry them to their beds later.”

Right… and when they are up all night looking for you because they never learned to fall asleep and stay asleep in their rooms, that makes life a lot easier, too?

Regrets.

Motherhood regrets are bad. They are the worse, I think. Because others see the mistakes you have made, knowing you know better, and judge. Even if they don’t want to.

You can be in a bad marriage and put on a brave face. You can work in a job that you hate because you were too afraid to follow your passion. You can hide the bills in the desk that you don’t know how you’ll ever pay and wish you had never racked up.

But children are a reflection of you that no mirror can match. And mine at bedtime, especially, are a reflection of my bad parenting decisions.

It’s funny… my mom said the last time that she was here, “For children with such an undisciplined lifestyle, they sure are happy!”

But I am not?

I suppose the one thing about it all is that it is not too late. As long as you are willing to work at bettering yourself as a parent, it can get better. And so I’ll read more books, talk to more people, leave my excuses on this page, and struggle for a little while so that in the long run it is all OK. It’s going to be hard. It is going to be taxing. It is going to be full of mistakes while I work on getting it right.

But, once I am done and my kids are sleeping better, I am feeling less apprehensive about bedtime and I actually get an hour or two alone with my husband at night with no kids up and in our faces, there will be peace. And no regrets. Because I will have done what I am supposed to and everyone will have been rewarded for it.

Even me.

And that is the truth about motherhood regrets.

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The Hypocrisy of Motherhood

I raise my hand and admit that I have done it.

‘I will never let my kid talk back to me!”

‘I would never let my child go out of the house looking like that!”

“Oh no, you’ll never see me feeding my child Cheetos for dinner!”

All said with justifiable defiance and an air of superiority loudly enough for everyone to hear. And I meant well. I did. When I said these things I passionately believed I would never do any of them.

And then I became a mother.

Writes the woman who allows her daughter to go to school carrying a frozen waffle, with her shoes on the wrong feet, a hot pink shirt with black polka dotted pants and one sock that covers her knee and one that does not.

I pick my battles.

Now that I have three children that can walk, talk, talk back and form a sentence faster than I can come up with a clever retort to their logic, I find myself apologizing A LOT to the people who knew me before kids. You know, the ones that were already knee deep in motherhood who probably had a pretty good idea at the time that I had NO FLIPPING CLUE what I was talking about? Yes, those that cursed me at the time to bear the weight of their pressures?

Yea, those women whose wishes came true?

I apologize to them a lot now.

Sometimes daily.

I have come to the realization that as grand and fantastic as motherhood can be – and it really can – it is also the one job that reminds me on a daily basis that I am a true hypocrite. Not because I want to be. There are other titles I would rather wear actually.

Mrs. America.

The Biggest Loser.

Mirror Ball Trophy Winner.

But hypocrite seems to scream at me the loudest.

Every time I catch a clip of a reality star feeding her child food she has chewed and have a quick, snapping opinion about it, I bite a piece of cheese off and take it from my mouth and hand it to my daughter. Not exactly the same thing but then it kinda is.

Or when one of my friends tells me that her preteen daughter kissed a boy at school and I think ‘NO WAY JOSE, MY daughters would never be allowed to let that happen!’ and then my 5 year old comes home and tells me that she let a boy kiss her on the cheek. My face reddens and the phone is dialed and the gushing apology is issued. Shamefully.

And now, as if turnabout is fair play, I have to stand, flat footed, knowing that it is my true punishment and listen to the up and comers tell me what I am doing wrong and how I should do it differently.

I deserve it, I know. But it still sucks.

Because now I see why the moms I used to chastise were always trying to get away from me.

They needed to find a hard object to pelt me with.

And so I find that though motherhood has giving me many labels – mom, caregiver, chef, maid, teacher, student, tutor, entertainer, lawyer and boxing ring referee – the one that seems to stick the most and humble me the most is hypocrite.

Because for all that I stand on my soap box and think I know, the hypocrisy of motherhood kicks it out from under me and leaves me picking up the pieces of not knowing anything at all.

Somehow, I kind of prefer it that way.

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