Confessions of a Guilty Mom

My children watch far too much TV. I know this because my two year old has started referring to me as "Mom".

As "Muuuuuuummmmm!!!!" is the usual form of address for one's mother in New Zealand and we have no American friends in our immediate vicinity, I can only conclude that the Disney Channel is to blame. This means of course, that yet another of my New Parent Resolutions has not so much as flown out the window, as it has been battered with a large stick before being plucked, stuffed, devoured and shat out the other end.

I can now put "I will never let my children watch TV" into the same basket as "I will never give my child a dummy", "I will never let my child eat junk food', and the loftily optimistic, "I will never shout at my children".

This basket can be found next to a bucket which is filled with rolled up balls of confident, hair-flicky statements such as, "My child shall sleep through the night", "My child will not only eat vegetables, they will love them" and the blissfully ignorant, "I shall adore breastfeeding", "My body shall return to it's pre-baby weight within weeks" and "My life shall carry on as before. La la la."

I cringe when I think what I, as a Party Girl, was like BC (Before Children).
If I heard a child screaming in a café, I would throw sharpened daggers at it (with my eyes obviously), before launching into a hissing rant with my Party Girl posse, "What a horrible child... it's obviously deranged... what an awful mother... it shouldn't be in a public place anyway... if it were my child, I would..."

Now I just think, "Oh, you poor woman."

Party Girls are filled with utopian ideals about what parenting should be. They don't mean to make you feel guilty, but they do - guilty about not breastfeeding, about co-sleeping, about not wanting to read The Cat in the Sodding Hat twenty times a day, about having children that throw tantrums, about letting one's offspring sit inside to memorise the Disney Channel.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it's because Party Girls are reared on a diet of women's fashion magazines - a gazillion glossy pages of guilt-ridden glamour. A world where it's not only possible but expected that you should be super-skinny with a perfect face, bonking your brains out in bone-creaking positions every night before running out the door each morning to manage a large, yet environmentally responsible corporation in really, really, high heeled shoes. A world where it's your fault if you can't meet the ideal, because you haven't tried hard enough.

Absorb enough of that guilt and you can't help it oozing out your pores occasionally.

Of course, Party Girls don't know (yet) that being a good parent isn't always something you can control. Your baby has some say too. Parents and children need to find their own way together, and most of the time 70% is about as good as it gets.

In fact, I often refer myself to my own golden law, one which should be emblazoned across all magazines - "You're Doing Okay."

Because you are.