I am daughter, I am mother, I am also wife. I pursue true self. On the way, I am puzzled, I feel uncomfortable, I made mistakes, sometimes I doubt myself, I still persist.

So…it’s off to soccer practice, Kumon math, piano lessons (which they hate, but playing an instrument is vital), and don’t forget to stop at the Montessori school to drop off the pre-registration for the baby (yes, he’s only three months old now, but you know how long those waiting lists are for good schools). Be sure you’re leaving time to squeeze in a Pilates class so you can be both a centred and sexy “yummy mummy.” Jump in the leased minivan you can’t really afford (but how ya gonna live with one car on this schedule?) to catch the infant stimulation and baby salsa classes at the neighborhood birth and pregnancy center, call the doula, pose for a belly cast, and then zoom home to help with (translation: fight over) homework. Dinner needs consideration; you must make something balanced and healthy, with no saturated fats. Remember to rinse off trace pesticide residues and watch milk for growth hormones and – oh my, you didn’t just serve tap water, did you?

When did neurotic become normal?

Come on! Is this really what we’ve gotta do in order to be a good mother in this day and age? Have we all drunk the toxic Kool-Aid? Society has sold us iconic images of the “good mother,” and the effort we put into reaching these ideals is not only misguided, it’s detrimental to family life, as we’ll see in the pages ahead.

If you stop and think about it, the “good mother” ideal is about as ridiculous as the Barbie doll beauty ideal. We’ve all heard that if Barbie were a live woman, her dimensions would put her at seven feet tall with a 40-inch chest and an 18-inch waist. Well, I believe if an iconic good mother really existed, she would have to have six arms, four hips, and be so highly evolved that her nipples would be conveniently located on her ankles, making them 100 percent accessible for her crawling babe. She would never need sleep, always be happy and patient, be equally adept at coaching soccer and helping with trigonometry homework, be able to co-exist in three places at once, and have $100K in disposable cash to spend on herself and the kids. C’mon-do you wanna look like that? (I know, except for the nipples, it actually sounds not bad.)

The point is, these good mother icons are nothing more than modern-day myths, and they’re making us miserable! These myths create a monolithic story, telling us how we should be and what we should be doing in order to be a good mother. We already have our own private, idiosyncratic confabulations about how to be a good mother, but we also have to navigate the greater societal myths of “good motherhood.”

• How Did We Get So Crazy

It wasn’t always this hard to hit the good mother mark. In earlier times we had tremendous faith in children, believing they would develop just fine, with minimal interference required. We treated children as robust and capable, and were aware that they could manage life. We made demands on them, and we expected them to adapt and accommodate as needed. They weren’t thought of as so precious and vulnerable back then. Nor did we carry the sole burden of “making or breaking” our children. Previous generations had the benefit of sharing the load. “It takes a village to raise a child,” as the saying goes, and we used to act more like a united village. Historically, there was a singular dominant ideal – one prevailing cultural myth – that dictated what the good mother was to do, so it looked pretty much the same in every household. If you saw a child misbehaving in the park, you took matters into your own hands because everyone dealt with kids more or less the same way. Image that happening these days? We’d be apoplectic at the thought of disciplining a stranger’s child.

So that makes for a bit of a dilemma. Today we suffer the burden of wanting to be good mothers, but without understanding exactly what that means. Everyone has a different idea of what is “right.” Do you go back to work, or not? Do you immunize, or not? Do you share a family bed, or not? Do you offer a pacifier, or not? Do you buy the $300 titanium helmet – or do you not quite love your child that much? Ouch! Mothers today don’t have clear marching orders. Instead, We’re faced with a barrage of instructions, often in direct conflict with each other.

This means we are no longer a homogenous community of moms. Instead, we are mothering “factions” split into opposing camps. No universal support means we can easily feel as though we’re under attack for our choices by mothers who are not like-minded. The working moms and the stay-at-home moms eye each other with envy but also with judgment, and the further apart we get from each other, the harder it becomes for any of us to make these tough decisions.

(to be continued)