You know what would make the Mommy wars go away?

[roseleaf]

If we would stop thinking that we could judge parents by one moment or one action.  I'm so tired of it, and I've been running into it all over the place lately.  That nice long letter to the mom on her phone about how much she's missing.  Yeah, except maybe she's taking 15 minutes on her phone out of her entire day and she needs a break.  Needs

Comments

[roseleaf]

I think you're at the stage where it's easiest to do this. You're reading and thinking about what kind of parent you want to be and arming yourself with all of that knowledge, but haven't had to make it all fit with your actual child and your actual family yet. ;-) As a parent, it's easier and harder. There are days when I would totally have thought, "Man, he needs to get off the phone and pay attention to his poor daughter." And there are days when I would have thought, "Poor guy. Can't she be quiet for five minutes and let him take a phone call?" We went through an awful stage with E from 18 months to 2 years. She would just scream when she wasn't happy about something, usually when she was hungry and/or tired and sometimes we couldn't help but be out in public for it. Waiting for food at restaurants was awful. I know people judged us for it, but there would be times when we were all tired and starving and a half an hour from home, and what else could we do? Or my dad would always want to go out to eat when they're here or we're there, and she doesn't nap well when we travel or when people are visiting, so she'd be tired and hungry and he'd say she was difficult. *sigh* It got much, much better when she got more verbal. I get compliments now on her behavior in restaurants, but my parenting hasn't changed. We just unfortunately went through a lot of her learning how to behave in public while she was misbehaving in public, if that makes any sense.