Was I a good mother?

It comes back at the strangest times. You’re at the kitchen sink, washing one cup, and there it is: the day you yelled about the shoes, and the look on his face. The school play you missed because of a shift. The year you were so tired you barely remember it. Your children are grown, and the question is still sitting at the table like it was never answered. Was I a good mother?

Notice what your memory keeps. It keeps the shoes. It keeps the play. It writes down every failure with a date on it. It doesn’t keep the thousand ordinary nights you showed up. The packed lunches. The fever you sat up with. The ride home at midnight when you asked no questions. Those didn’t feel like anything at the time. They were just Tuesday.

In 1953 an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst named Donald Winnicott, who spent a career watching mothers and babies, wrote down an idea that changed how many people think about mothering. A child doesn’t need a perfect mother, he said. A child needs a “good enough” one. He didn’t mean it as a shrug. He meant that the small failures, the times she couldn’t come right away, the times she got it wrong and then came back, are part of how a baby learns that waiting ends and that someone comes back. Getting it wrong was never the whole story. Coming back was the part that counted.

You came back. Again and again, for years, when you were tired and when you were scared and when nobody thanked you. That’s what good enough looks like from the inside. It never feels like enough while you’re doing it.

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If you’d like, tonight, write down the other list. Three things your memory never filed. The birthday cake at eleven at night. The hand on a back in a waiting room. The time you said sorry first. Read it once. You don’t have to believe it all at once. Just let it sit next to the other list for a while.

A list kept honestly would have two columns. Most of us keep only one.

All these years you’ve asked whether you did right by them. Maybe it’s time someone asked how you are.

— Be A Good Mom

Source: Winnicott, D. W. (1953). “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 89–97.