Momma Cusses

It’s okay to be mad. It’s not okay to make that everyone else’s problem.

I am not a perfect parent and that’s okay. I am doing my best and that’s enough. I am learning how to be a parent just like my kid is learning how to be a person.

Taking care of yourself is taking care of your kids.

Even if you’re looking through college guides or are already breaking in your empty nest, any shift to being more aware of your communication, emotionally responsive, and receptive is going to result in a net positive.

Mom Guilt hurts but with purpose. Mom Shame just sucks.

If our job as parents is to parent ourselves out of a job, part of that is letting our kid feel failure when we are still there to help pick up the pieces.

My mom raised me the best way she could with the tools she had available. I asked her once if she found being a single mom harder than being a not-single mom. "Just because I was married to your father doesn't mean I wasn't always a single mom," she said more than once.

Seriously, as far as complex organisms go, human children are born painfully useless.

FIELD GUIDE ENTRY: A Note to Extra-Experienced Parents

No alphabet soup after my name. No credentials to speak of beyond “in the trenches” parenting.

Our job as parents is not to prevent bad things from happening to them but to give them the guidance to cope with bad things when they do happen.

Being a kid is harder than we remember. Being a parent is harder than we expected.

the end of the world to lose your temper. We’re all human, we’re all imperfect, and we will all lose our shit. That doesn’t make you a bad person or a good person. Big feelings are morally neutral. What determines if we are a good person is how we handle ourselves and the situation after the shit losing.

If you aren’t emotionally regulated, it feels kind of bold to expect that of your kid.

Don’t let social media dictate who you are as a person. It can influence, it can educate, it can alleviate. It can’t dictate.

Messing up around and with our kids is, in and of itself, a teachable moment. A lecture-free one at that. When we make a mistake, we have the opportunity to apologize. We have the chance to show our kids how to own your mistakes, take accountability, apologize, and rectify what we can in the aftermath. That’s not perfect-parent shit, that’s good-human shit.

That’s the problem with perfection; it’s a utopian idea. No matter how perfect something is, there’s always one little thing that could be improved, one more boundary that could be pressed, one tiny little detail that could use a little more work. You could be a perfect parent but they’ll still have to learn how to live in an imperfect world.

We present it this way: It’s not okay to take your emotions out on someone or something else. It is especially not okay to hurt them, damage them, or draw blood in the expression of that big feeling.

Also, Gwenna tried to make you cry with a story about eggnog. She hopes it worked.

Cinderblocks are not babyproofing tools, generally speaking

Ever woken up in a bad mood for no good goddamn reason? Everybody does. Everybody, including kids.

It might sound dramatic and just the tiniest bit cliché, but “I’m sorry” is one of the most powerful things you can say to your children.