It's truly amazing how prepared you can be for parenthood, only to have everything you thought you know fall by the proverbial wayside. For me, it took about six months of motherhood to realize just how wrong I was about, well, pretty much everything. Of course, now that I'm a little more "seasoned," it's easy to say the following but, trust me new moms: you shouldn't worry about making mistakes as a mother, for so many reasons.
I'm pretty much the queen of mom mistakes. I had that ridiculous pre-motherhood hubris, making a list of all the things I wouldn't let my kids play with, or eat, or watch. I held on to that list tightly, until all hell broke loose and I had a two year old and was pregnant with a second, suddenly and unexpectedly. Life happened, and I found myself compromising all of my ideals just so I could survive. It's a good thing I was seeing a psychiatrist at the time, because I had such an onslaught of mom guilt that I was almost crushed by it. All of those things I swore I'd never do? I did them (like, all of them) and I hated myself for it.
But, it turns out, making mistakes isn't nearly as bad for your kids as you (or anyone else) may have initially thought. Life goes on, your kids thrive despite the horrors you've subjected them to (like letting your kid sit in a soiled diaper which is something I've never done and by never I mean I have totally done that and it's the worst but it happens and, hey, we all survived), and you realize that one of your mom friends looked away only to find her toddler drinking her coffee so, I mean, we all mess up.
Honestly, mistakes are bound to happen and while it is pretty clichéd and kind of overused, you truly do learn more from the mistakes you'll inevitably make, than you will from the seemingly "perfect" days in which everything went right and parenthood seemed like a breeze. So, if you're like me (or any other parent) and you're making mistakes, here are 10 reasons why you shouldn't worry about it: