Winning the Mommy Wars

I often have a secret 'theme' for my life.  It's a little catchphrase that really only means something to me; it helps to keep me focused on what's important to me at the time.  It will stick with me for a few months or maybe as long as half a year, then gets replaced.

It's time for a new one, and I'm going to share it because it fits the theme of this blog so nicely.  It doesn't take a psychologist to guess that fostering a baby is bringing out a thread of perfectionism in me, with the desire to "get it right" this time.  Almost 15 years ago now I had my first baby, and the first six months were miserable.  He didn't sleep well, it took forever to get breastfeeding working properly, it was the dead of winter, I had no friends with babies, and no family in town.  I probably had post-partum depression, but who was there around to notice?  On the one hand I hated going back to work and leaving my son with a babysitter at six months, but I was also partly relieved, having felt like an abject failure as a stay-at-home Mom.

So!  Here I am doing it again.  The first bewildering few months are over, when lack of sleep impairs any brain activity whatsoever.  The following honeymoon period (which seemed to last about five minutes) is also over, and our cute little cuddly baby has turned into an opinionated, screaming (not to mention teething) little so-and-so that pushes me away and eagerly awaits the day when he can crawl away from me, which is coming soon.

It's time to get re-focused (at least that's what today's beautiful September weather tells me) and step up my game.  So, the theme for the next four or five months, until the baby moves on, is.... "Winning the Mommy Wars".  Aim high!, they say, right?  Although do motivational experts generally advocate a combative approach?  Probably not.  Oh well.

I promise to share with you how this all works out for me, which is, after all, why I'm telling you this.  First I'll have to do some research, to nail down in a bit more detail all the areas I need to work on.  That's probably going to entail reading some mommy blogs, which I'm already apprehensive about.  That's not something I had to worry about the first time around.  Which reminds me, I should ask, what do I realistically expect to be different about my role this time?  To be honest, not much.  I expect I will abjectly fail again, but this time... I hope to keep my sense of humour about it all.  And of course, share it all with you.