Tag Archives: societal pressures

New digs, pitching businesses, anxiety, and valuing the self

The Squee

LOOKIT MY NEW DIGS AREN’T THEY PRETTY??

If you’re reading this by RSS, c’mon, click through, you know you want to! It’s not flawless quite yet (more than half of which is on my side, not the designer’s), but like many flawed things it’s nonetheless gorgeous. Look up! Look to the side! Look down! New tagline! New About page! New annoyingly alliterative blurb! Ads and PSAs! A footer! With info! Innit all so awesome??

…Ahem.

Laura Pelofske worked tirelessly to, first, figure out what I wanted when I didn’t even know, then to implement and improve upon it in a way that left it accessible to the most people and attractive. She is underpaid and underemployed, and I highly recommend working with her.

The Introspection

Once I (finally!) got my arse in gear (and asked some very helpful people, thank you all) and decided on an ad price schedule, I started sending out pitches — first to people who had already expressed an interest, then to people I knew but who didn’t know I was offering ad space. I haven’t quite worked up to doing completely cold pitches yet, but I started noticing a few things doing this: first, that while the first email was absolutely panic-attack-inducing, and I still had anxiety with each following one, it got… easier. Not easy, but less incapacitatingly terrifying.

I also realized that while I’m still conflicted about setting out to earn money when I question the basic usefulness of a capitalistic system (to put it politely), there is something profoundly (if you will forgive the word and the cliche) empowering about saying “Yes, I value myself and my labor and this work which I have created, and you should too.” Even expecting that most business and artisans that I approach are going to decline, for whatever reason, being able to write an email that indicates that I value my own work (skipping the familiar and ridiculous self-effacement that has long been my companion) — that’s powerful. That’s huge. I don’t think I could have done it last year — or, if I could’ve, it would have been a lie. Maybe it still is, a little, but “fake it ’til you make it” sometimes, y’know, works, because I did it, and it felt like an act, and then I did it some more, and it felt… right. Like simple truth, not smarmy facade. My work has value. I have value.

There are problems to be sure in equating “able to earn money in a kyriarchal capitalistic society” with “has value”, because who is able to earn is absolutely affected by the fucked up hierarchies of who we consider valuable. That is, those of us with the most privilege (including socioeconomic privilege, because the rich really do get richer) have the most earning potential, and are least likely to experience hiring and pay discrimination. And no person should need to “make” or “do” or “buy” to have their basic human worth recognized and honored and respected. But it is also, sometimes, for some of us, true that we have been so beaten down by the hatred and disregard our society has for us that we stop valuing ourselves. We are told we are worthless so many times that we stop asking for our share, or we never do it in the first place.

It is not true that, though, all that’s holding us back is ourselves, not even for mostly-privileged middle class white cis women like me. There are, still, many factors holding us back, and we are less likely to be valued — are likely to be paid less, in capitalistic terms — even when we value ourselves and ask for our due. (Sometimes, in punishment, especially when we ask for our due.) But we should value ourselves, and ask and expect others to, and know we are righteous in our anger when they do not.¹

The Encouragement

If you already know you are the bees knees, ignore this, and go explore the awesome that is my new theme. If you’re anything like me, though, and can maintain that knowledge only occasionally, sporadically, until, in the dark and the quiet, the doubts and the hatred whisper, do me a favor and try this: Do something, today, that tells yourself you value yourself. Sign up for a class, pick a pattern to knit for only you, send out an ad pitch, up your rates, re-write your resume, accept help that is offered, ask for help not because you are “so low” as to need it but because you are so valued you deserve it and because what you would ask for is far less than what you would freely offer to anyone else if you were in a position to do so. Pick something for you would only do for someone you valued, and then do it for yourself.

I know this sounds like the cheapest of armchair self-help therapy advice (because it, essentially, is), but from someone who knows what it is to really, utterly loathe oneself, to have one’s brain entirely devoted to causing itself pain and anguish, believe me: this is a good thing. If you’re dealing with more than everyday kyriarchy-induced misogynistic self-hatred (as though that weren’t more than anyone should have to deal with), it might not trip your brain into self-love overnight, and you won’t wake up tomorrow free from today’s hell of depression, and it won’t pull a million bucks toward you through the “law” of attraction, but nonetheless, this is one piece of the work that can, in fact, reroute your neurology. It might take you a decade, as it has me, of trying and failing and trying and sort of succeeding and trying and idealizing suicide and trying and trying and trying and trying one damn more time, but we can reduce kyriarchy’s control on our minds, we can start to value and respect ourselves as much as we would others just like us, and we can learn that the dark little voices are lies, even if we never silence them altogether.

The Conclusion

The thing is, I do live under capitalism, and while I respect and admire those who are able to extract themselves from it, sometimes, for some of us, saying “yes, I will accept payment for my work, so I can support other artists and philosophers, so I can pay my child’s alloparent a fair wage, so I can feed my family or the neighbour down the street, so I can say fuck you to a society that would hold me as worthless”² — it’s revolutionary.

—————————————————————————

Which doesn’t mean I’m assuming “Discrimination!!!1!” every time I receive a “no, thanks” as a response to a pitch. When I receive pitches from companies that expect me to blog for them, place links for them, and advertise for them not for a fair marketer’s salary but for “free samples” of mass produced crap? Yeah, that I’m comfortable calling a symptom of a society that does not value women, especially not women-with-children, and especially not women-with-children who blog. ↩
These thoughts significantly informed by Bluebird by Ariel Gore. ↩

35 Comments | Posted on 3 January 2011 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: bipolar, declaiming revolution, Gender, Mental Health, Meta, societal pressures

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“What if…?” On prenatal precautions and superstitions, and the burden of blame

Lying in bed the other night, drifting off to sleep thinking of holidays and cookie traditions and solstice eclipses, I jerked alert with a sudden, horrible realization: I have not been taking B vitamins. And without B vitamins — folate/folic acid in particular –, babies get neural tube defects. It’s Science. Everyone knows this. And once one knows one is pregnant, it’s really too late, because it’s most critical in those very first weeks, when the neural tube is first being formed. And for whatever reason, I, though trying to conceive, had completely forgotten about this Most Vital Fact and have neglected to take any form of prenatal combination vitamin or folic acid substitute and so I have doomed¹ my child to cleft palate, or spina bifida, or, my nightmare when I was on a drug with a significant increase in NTDs, anencephaly.

Except that’s not true.

The truth is that a maternal diet low in folate (found primarily in leafy greens) is associated with an increase of neural tube defects noticeable on a population scale, enough so that in the USA we enrich nearly all grain products with folic acid². The truth is that even without supplementation, the risk of NTDs are still really quite low. There’s also decent evidence that we piss away most of the content of artificial, pressed-together single-dose multivitamins. So for most people, especially those with halfway decent diets who do not regularly suffer from starvation or malnutrition, skipping vitamin supplementation is a pretty safe choice.

Except that’s not true, either. Hear me out.

The risk for choosing to avoid supplementation — or any other prenatal practice dictated as standard by society — isn’t, primarily, physical or nutritional: it’s social and emotional. The risk isn’t that one will have a child with a neural tube defect (which, even with food- or supplement-based folate intake far exceeding the ridiculously low minimums set by the FDA, is entirely possible) or other “imperfection”, the risk is that one will have a child with an atypicality and be blamed for not doing everything possible to prevent it.

The risk is that one will spend an entire pregnancy obsessing and worrying over what one “ought” to have done better, taken more of, eaten less of. The risk is that one will blame oneself for the rest of one’s life should it happen. The risk is that one will live with a constant refrain of “What if?” running in the back of their brains, never ceasing, never slowing, never backing down in the face of reason or rationality or science or practical assessment of odds because what if. What if something’s wrong because I didn’t take vitamins, did drink a beer, ate too much tuna? What if I could have prevented this condition/disease/disability/death if I had only done this differently, better, not at all? What if, what if, what if?

When we have taken all precautions — based in science and fact, or superstition and “everyone knows”³, or some muddled combination thereof — that are deemed appropriate by our society, well then, things just happen sometimes, and though still at risk for the whispers (or outright statements) that we must have done something wrong, we also often get sympathy (or pity) and are assured of our inculpability. But if we didn’t? Ah, then, we are at fault, inescapably, unforgivably. Then it — our baby born brainless, our newborn unable to nurse, our child needing yet another surgery — obviously wouldn’t have happened if only we had done better/more/what we were supposed to.

And so we take our vitamins, get the tests, avoid soft cheeses⁴ and deli meats, and pray nothing goes wrong and we will not be victim to the unbearable blame.

*****

Appendix, or Apologia: Of course there are good reasons for some of our prenatal precautions, and there is almost always at least some seed of reality behind each of them (except the all-soft-cheeses here in the USA — that one I’m fully willing to mock). I’m hardly arguing against ignoring all precautions, or saying that people only follow them out of preemptive defense. We each take the information we have and perform absolutely brilliant feats of risk-benefit calculations on it, and make the best decisions out of the choices available to us given the resources we have. My point is not that pregnant people are sheep, or prenatal precautions are entirely pointless, for there are Prenatal Do Nots that I indeed do not do⁵, and some proscriptions I proverbially thumb my nose at⁶, and some precautions — the folate — that I wish I had done. My point⁷ rather is that fears, not so much of the risk but of the social repercussions of bypassing expected precautions, are absolutely included in our calculations. And sometimes, when we deviate, they keep us up at night.

Because having any form of physical variation such as spina bifida is of course automatically DOOOOOOOM. For the unfamiliar, this footnote is sarcasm. ↩
Why we don’t instead, say, make leafy greens — and vegetables generally — more accessible to everyone who wants them is a rather different rant. ↩
And oh, how often one masquerades as the other! ↩
Despite all USian cheeses being required to be pasteurized or aged sufficiently that risks of listeria are considered nonexistent; some soft cheeses somewhere in the world aren’t, and so have an astronomically small risk of carrying pathogens, and so best to avoid all soft cheeses everywhere, obviously. ↩
Such as deep abdominal work — when not a part of Maya Abdominal Massage — which is really a bummer because my psoas needed some lovin’ this week and didn’t get it. ↩
Oh holiday homemade eggnog with raw eggs and a dash of rum, how I adore thee! ↩
In this post, because oh will there ever be more posts on pregnancy and kyriarchy and social pressures and the arbitrary nature of Western pregnancy and birth, should this currently-seed-size collection of cells stick around for the entire ride. ↩

23 Comments | Posted on 26 December 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: food, pregnancy, societal pressures, superstitions and sorta science

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10 Things I Do Not Own and 5 Things I Do, or, Messing With Stereotypes

10 Things I Do Not Own (and Yet Still Manage to Be a Woman)

1. Razors. Or Nair. Or wax. Or any form of depilatory.

2. Bathroom scale. (We do, however, own a kitchen scale. The Man uses it to bake bread.)

3. Wrinkle cream. Or cellulite cream. Or “age-defying” anything.

4. Underwire bra. (I was going to say “bra” at all, but I do technically own a couple soft/sports bras. I just never wear them, unless all my tanks are dirty. And sometimes, even when all my tanks are dirty? I don’t wear anything under my shirt at all.)

4.5 Matching bra and underwear set. Or anything that could be called “lingerie”.

5. Diet books. Or weight-loss cook books. Or calorie lists. Or anything from Weight Watchers.

6. High heels. (After shopping for this year’s Halloween, I do now own a pair. Since my Halloween party plans fell through, however, I have yet to wear them outside the house. Or in the house, except for ten minutes the day I bought them.)

6. Pantyhose/tights. (Though at 5’10″ and 300 pounds I likely couldn’t find any to fit me even if I tried.)

7. Hair spray. Or gel. Or mousse.¹ Or a blow dryer. Or curling iron. Or flat iron. Or any hair-related appliance more complicated than a brush. (Though I do own two of those, and a comb.)

8. Purse. (When I say this, people ask me where I keep my Stuff, to which I reply, what stuff? so: )

8.5: Stuff. (I do own a knitting bag, though. Which holds all of my knitting stuff. And, since women’s clothing manufacturers decided Women Don’t Need Pockets, not even in comfy unstylish jeans, for fuck’s sake, it also holds my wallet. Except for when it doesn’t.)

9. Diamond ring, earring, necklace, bracelet…

9.5 Ear piercings in which one might wear diamond earrings (or not). Or, technically I did, for about six months when I was 20. Now I have tiny pin-point scars.

10. Anything that has ever been declared “this season’s must have”. Ever. Not even was-declared-so-five-years-before-I-bought-it, as far as I know.

And yet, somehow, I am still a woman.

5 Things I Do Own (and Yet Still Manage to Advocate for Gender Equality)

1. Makeup that costs more than $25 for one bottle. (Though I must confess, I’ve worn it all of twice. But that has far more to do with laziness than lack of slightly-more-often desire.)

2. A dress. More than one!

3. Knitting supplies. Lots of knitting supplies. Which I use to make things. For other people. Even for men.

4. High heels. (And I’m so looking for someplace to wear them. Any suggestions?)

5. A corset. (I used to have a strapless suede bustier, but the dang cat puked on it, and it was never the same.)

And yet, somehow, I am still feminist² and advocate for gender equality.

***

The thing is, stereotypes are shit. If you don’t want to shave your legs or armpits or anywhere else, don’t. If you want to wax your genitals, go for it (though, um, OW?). If you don’t particularly want to go along with societally-imposed gender roles, but can’t afford the spoons or loss of social capital or risk to your job or the custody of your children or your life (especially if the gender assigned to you is not your gender, and especially if your gender is not even recognized by wider culture), then you have my sympathy and my solidarity in working to expand the options available to you.

You aren’t not-your-gender because you say “no thanks” to things society says your gender is supposed to own or do, and you aren’t not-a-gender-activist because you say “yes please” (or “fuck it, fine”) to any of those things either. It’s well and good to have conversations about the pressures people³ are under to conform to gender expectations, but if the end result of the conversation is not an increase in the options available and in acceptance for diversity in choices, then we’re doing something wrong.

So, if it’s your thing, shave your legs, skip your pits, buzz your hair, put on a slinky strappy dress and comfy flat shoes — and come dance with me.⁴

Or, for that matter, shampoo. Baking soda/apple cider vinegar. Look it up. ↩
An adjective meaning “acts mostly in accord with the radical idea that women are people.” ↩
Both women and men — not to mention the pressure for everyone to neatly fall into the limited categories of “woman” or “man”. ↩
Or invite me over for D&D. I could go either way. ↩

31 Comments | Posted on 17 November 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: feminists don't laugh, Gender, gender roles, messing with stereotypes, misogyny, societal pressures, trans

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My parenting style did not make my motherhood a prison; my society did

I am slightly ambivalent (though mostly loatheful) to bring more publicity to this frustrating piece, but let me tell you about an essay by Erica Jong published on Saturday in the Wall Street Journal. In Mother Madness¹, Jong manages to sweepingly, and contradictorily, indict “narcissistic” celebrities, adoptive parents, biological parents, parents who use nannies, attachment parents, helicopter parents, environmentalist parents, perfectionist parents, political parents, and politically inactive parents — and she engages in this non-stop mother-hate while professing a desire to make mothers feel less guilty and release us from “rules”.

Elephant? What elephant?

Again and again Jong mentions-in-passing the central problem of modern motherhood, and the key to any real solutions, but again and again she brushes it off:

In agrarian societies, perhaps wearing your baby was the norm, but today’s corporate culture scarcely makes room for breast-feeding on the job, let alone baby-wearing.

In the absence of societal adjustment to the needs of children, parents have to revise their own schedules.

If you are busy raising children without societal help and trying to earn a living during a recession, you don’t have much time to question and change the world that you and your children inhabit.

Here’s an idea: how about we change society. At one point Jong goes on to say “Our foremothers might be appalled by how little we have transformed the world of motherhood.” — indeed, I believe she’s right. But moreover, I’d say they’d be appalled by how little desire feminists such as she show for doing so, at least in mother-hating essays such as this.

“Natural” and “attachment” parenting “[is] a prison for mothers.”

Jong mocks attachment parents² with particular bile, but from where I’m standing, attachment parents (defined loosely — no more loosely or vaguely than Jong does — for this purpose as those who value child-caregiver entwinement, including valuing breastfeeding) have done more for parents than those who attack them:

It is³ attachment parents who are working to improve pumping break laws. It is attachment parents who are agitating for flex time and paid parental leave and job sharing options. It is attachment parents who are responsible for legal protections for nursing in public. It is attachment parents who are engaging in concrete actions to try to change society to help women and children and parents.

Are there misogynists who call themselves attachment parents? Absolutely — much as there are misogynists (among whom I include mother-blamers), who call themselves feminists. Are most of those who call themselves attachment parents — or who would fit under the definition given above — apolitical, and striving simply to live their life as best they can muddle through it (who are, indeed, following her penultimate pronouncement: “Do the best you can.”)? Assuredly, as are most parents who do not align with attachment parenting.

I could rant for years⁴ on the problems with prescriptivist parenting, on the sexism and classism and racism and everything-else-ism in natural family living and attachment parenting advocacy. Although I do, indeed, own a copy of Sears’ The Baby Book, I have never lent it nor recommended it without at the least a five-minute caveat (more than once an hour-long rant) on its misogyny and the many, many ways it perpetuates kyriarchy in all its forms.

Which makes it different from any other baby book not at all.

Perfectly non-kyriarchal parenting styles and other mythical beasts

Not once in this diatribe against everything wrong with mothers today⁵ is there a consideration of the ways in which other styles of parenting have treated women, nor their role in perpetuating kyriarchy even while seemingly “emancipating” women. Attachment parenting (or possibly helicopter parenting, or natural parenting, or perfectionist parenting — it’s never quite clear whether Jong recognizes any differences in these styles, nor the ways in which they are often contradictory) is a prison, we are informed — but what of (for lack of a better term) mainstream parenting? What of the baby-trainers? What of the parenting of two plus decades ago, pre this purported “orgy of motherphilia”? Are these philosophies, in fact, any better suited to empower women in the long term? I would argue they are not at all, though they might be harmful in different ways, but Jong assumes their superiority without examination.

The point that Jong misses — and in fact herself proves — is that there is no way for mothers to win. Stay home with your children? You are imprisoned. Hire a nanny? You’re taking a mother away from her children.⁶ Figure out how to take your kid on the road with you? You’re only pretending to have it all, as you “thrust [your] babies into the arms of siblings or daddies.” She supposes to speak on behalf of mothers, while talking about us in terms that make my skin crawl, remind me strongly of every other mother-blaming pundit out there, and leave me feeling anything but supported and heard.

My own life

Neither my child nor my parenting made for me a prison: I choose my parenting not out of a desire for perfection — a perfect parent I am not, nor strive to be — nor to make of it a sand pile to bury my head in⁷; I choose it because there are certain practices in infancy — expectations that new humans have — that are, I would argue, “encoded in our DNA”, and although humans are wonderfully malleable, and will put up with an inordinate amount of variation and deviation from those expectations⁸, routinely asking our children to do so on so many levels does them — nor, in the long run, as they choose our retirement homes and lead our countries and usher the next generation of our genetics into the world, us — no favors.

What makes for me a prison is not my child nor my choices to breastfeed or babywear or use cloth diapers⁹ or — I am sure Jong would gasp in horror — elimination communication: it is that my coparent had to return to work at three weeks postpartum, and thereafter lacked any further paid time off until he was able to accrue more. It is that I, parent of a car-adverse child, lacked public transit options beyond a once-every-hour bus. It is that had I been able to afford daycare — for it is not publicly funded — when he was younger, I would have been unlikely to find a place knowledgeable enough to care for a diaper-free baby. It is that the school I enrolled in when he was a year and a half old was not eligible for publicly-funded loans or grants, leaving me with higher debts and fewer borrower’s protections, because of its flexibility in class schedule and course load — the very reason I chose it. These are not inherent problems with my parenting choices; these are failures of my society to support parents at all.

“Do the best you can.” But don’t do that.

In the end, I refuse to go along with Jong’s acceptance of the status quo, when the status quo says that I must choose between meeting my needs and meeting my child’s. Jong would wave away a child’s need for human milk¹⁰, for proximity to stable caregivers, but it makes those needs no less real. I wholeheartedly agree that guilt for the daily compromises and imperfections of good-enough parents does no one good, least of all parents; but blame for our own imprisonment, when we are fighting not only to survive but to counter the world’s hatred of us and our children? I fail to see what good that does us either.

My parenting style did not make my motherhood a prison, my society did; and attacks such as this only make its walls stronger.

————–

And thanks so much for that casual ableism. ↩
Though many of the traits and habits she mentions are more characteristic of philosophies on the opposite end of the spectrum from attachment parenting, merely overlap with attachment parenting as in a Venn diagram, or may be found equally among nearly all styles. ↩
Largely though not entirely, and this caveat follows throughout. ↩
Wait, I already have. ↩
By which, apparently, she means middle+ class mostly-privileged women, for the needs and desires of so many who do not fit that limited mold — women still fighting to keep their babies, or keep their children alive, or who would give anything to quit their menial jobs to stay home with their kids — seem not to be her concern at all. ↩
“…impoverished immigrant nannies who help to raise our kids while their own kids are left at home with grandparents.” ↩
“Our obsession with parenting is an avoidance strategy. It allows us to substitute our own small world for the world as a whole.” Because obsessive parenting and attachment parenting are the same thing, of course. ↩
See biologically appropriate parenting. ↩
If our autonomy is so fragile that it can be eliminated via the choice to use not-significantly-more-work reusable diapering options, that says far more about our autonomy than about the supposed superiority of disposables. ↩
And on an individual level, I might agree — in that formula is adequate nourishment to allow most individual infants to thrive — but when entire societies substitute artificial milks for the real deal, we can absolutely see the negative ramifications. Yes, even in industrialized countries such as the USA. ↩

33 Comments | Posted on 8 November 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: attachment parenting, gender roles, societal pressures

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Parents: No, you do not have to Try Your Very Best

I’ve run across this a thousand times before, but here’s the most recent example which inspired the following (no, I’m not linking):

[Parenting] is a job in which you need to put forth your very best effort.

admonishes one parent to another (who apparently isn’t meeting the author’s standards).

This? Is such bullshit.

Yes, our parenting choices matter. No, not “anything goes”. Yes, kids deserve so much, and no, a lot of kids aren’t getting what they need. But who can possibly sustain a Very Best Effort at every moment for at least 18 years? I’d say no one can. I surely can’t. And the pressure this puts on women — for it is indubitably mothers who receive the brunt of this admonishment — is untenable.

Much like in the attachment discussion, kids have needs, and often we ignore those needs, or try to fill them with things that aren’t quite right. There’s nothing wrong with trying to do better, especially if one is trying to go against the standards of a society that marginalizes children and alternately exalts and belittles them. There’s nothing wrong with putting effort into parenting, or spending a lot of time researching decisions, or thinking of parenting as the most important job of your life.

But there’s nothing necessarily wrong with not, either. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with just doing what you do and not putting extraordinary effort into parenting, either.

What does it even mean that we “need” to use our “very best effort”? So what, if we don’t, we’ll fail at parenting? We’ll ruin our kids? But if they’re not ruined (and how do we measure??), then I guess it was enough? But if we ruin them, is that proof we didn’t try hard enough? Or that failure is OK as long as we tried hard enough?

How messed up is that is that philosophy? According to that thinking, if we spend 23 hours a day with our children, does that mean if we “fail” we should have spent 24? If we sleep only seven hours a night, does that mean if we “fail” we should have slept only six? How much is one’s very best? Do we have to collapse, push ourselves to exhaustion and past it (to death?), before we can rest safely knowing that no one will say of us that we should have done more? But no — someone will say we should have rested more. That wasn’t our best. We could have tried harder for balance.

Kids do not need perfection — which is wonderful, because none of us can achieve it. They need good enough. They need their basic needs met: for interdependence and attachment, for freedom and responsibilities, for a stable base to jump from and a safe place to land. But they don’t need every need met perfectly every time. They don’t need a mistake-free upbringing. And they certainly don’t need us to break trying to meet impossible standards — or impossible standards of effort.

I’m not a particularly laissez faire parent (though I might call my parenting free-range inspired), nor a laissez-faire-in-parenting advocate. I think some decisions are better than others. I think some decisions are worse than others. And I don’t think “but I was ____ and I’m Just Fine(TM)!” is a particularly good justification for continuing practices we know are harmful and for which we have accessible alternatives. But at some point, we need to say that it’s enough. Our effort is enough. We are enough. Even if we don’t do everything the ideal way, even if we perform the blasphemy of not even trying to. Our good enough effort is good enough.

You are a good enough parent. And even if you’re not, your good enough effort at doing better is good enough. Maybe you could try harder, research more, up the pressure, increase the guilt when you (inevitably) fall short — but why? If there’s something you think you could be doing better, and want to be doing, and have the ability to do, then do it. Not because you’re not good enough right now (you are), but simply because you want to. Or because it would make you life easier. Or your parenting more joyful. Or your child happier or healthier. Not, please, because you’d be failing if you didn’t, because unless what you’re doing now is likely to kill your child in the near future, better is probably not a requirement. It’s probably just better.

And good enough? Is enough.