Not good
Some thoughts on what is and isn't enough.
A few weeks ago, I had one of those **sure, go on ahead and watch from outside your body and be unnecessarily mean to this kid** moments. After she got mad back and stormed away, I thought to myself: What if I am not actually a very good mom? Like, really, no drama or heightened emotion, just the genuine question: What if? What if I am doing the “best I can” and it turns out, like baking (or something more neutral), I am just not very good at this?
The next thought was something like, okay, well…you’re stuck with her and she is stuck with you so…
As I type this I can hear the swirling counter: “There is an answer!! ‘Good enough!!’” “That’s all parents need to be!!”
It’s true. There’s lots to back this up. The phrase “good enough mother” originates with D.W. Winnicott’s work around attachment and development. Most people use it as a shorthand to say, “don’t worry so much, you don’t have to be perfect, you just need to be ‘good enough.’”
If we take perfection out of it, we all seem to know that the way kids are loved and cared for matters a lot. In fact, whenever I come back to Winnicott’s work, and research around attachment in general, I am kind of shocked by how much kids actually do need from us. And as long as the word “good” is on the table, “bad” is out there too. I don’t know about you, but for me, its not always easy to know where the line is.
Within this cultural and patriarchal context, mothers bear a notoriously singular burden of reputational and internalized responsibility for the personhood of their children. It’s WAY too much. In this sense, the idea that good enough IS enough feels like a drop of mercy.
But, for whatever reason, the “good-enough” idea has never helped me that much.
I tend to see parent-child relationships as this reciprocal, co-created, and ever-evolving thing. Each person gets to sort of bounce themselves off the other while respectively wading through the waters of becoming…something. Of course, they each have different roles and domains of responsibility but both are sort of locked into an ecosystem of learning through and with the other.
What if the whole thing sort of defies the categories “good” or “bad”?
Attachment research points us towards a kind of parenting that is expansive in its acceptance of a child’s subjective experience. (This doesn’t mean anything beyond accepting the reality of child’s reality.) What if being a mother and loving my child is less about being anything except genuinely in it with her? What if the process is the goal?
I went to a little talk with the poet Kate Baer last week. During a conversation about writing she was talking about how hard it is to get over the fear. At one point she said something like: there is a reason people are so responsive to Mary Oliver and lines like, “you do not have to be good.”
Palpable, relief.
Here’s the whole poem, because it’s good.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
To not have to be “good” or even “good enough”…to put my effort instead toward being more present to what is inside myself and in her… maybe its enough.
As it turns out, choosing presence and process in this way can feel pretty hard. There are so many things working against it and so much in us that is trying to escape. But I think a lot about how the more I let my daughter be who she is, the more it invites me to do the same. Sometimes there is more friction because of it. I just have to trust, that in that process, in the bouncing off of each other, in learning to be more in my body and letting her be in hers, there is so much good.
xx
Morgan
Ps. Meetup is next week! Plus an event on burnout with In Good Taste @ Little Ripper on May 18. Can’t wait.
love your mind and your thoughts ♥️