Last Christmas I got another crazy mug. "Mothers are angels, only without wings" it says. With a heart-warming card from a friend that she finds it as admirable as I can do it with three children, the household and the job. I would have liked to have been happy about the card and the mug – you don't want to be ungrateful either – but unfortunately both just don't apply. I am a mother, yes. But the thing with the angel and the attribute "admirable" unfortunately have absolutely nothing to do with reality. I am just the best mother I can be. An honest, authentic, committed mother. The result of my efforts is certainly NOT angelic. At the very least, I sometimes remember a little of this renegade Lucifer. The Troublemaker among the winged. I can make trouble almost as well as my brood if I am in the right mood or in a lack of time. They must have the gene from somewhere.
Conni's mother is a mythical creature
Let's be honest, the comparison with angels is probably a limp for most mothers. But what can actually be said about us: We are very gullible. At least in the beginning. At the beginning of our brilliant Super Mom career, we willingly believe in the existence of these always-patient mothers, who can be found in children's books á la Conni with a bow in their hair or Bobo dormouse. Honestly now, they never lose their nerve. Never. Bobo turns off the vacuum cleaner twenty times. Mom laughs. Conni wants to shit smart for the fiftieth time. Mom is happy. In advertising, Muddi smiles with the brand-new upholstery cleaner and scrubs the chocolate stains off the sofa, while the sweet little boy is just ruining the tablecloth with his banged hands. Zack, and we already think that we fail all along the line. Raven mothers, we who also know feelings like anger, helplessness and hysteria. But after eleven years of motherhood, I finally understood it: someone just came up with all these super mothers in books, films and advertising. They are as real as Mickey Mouse, Rapunzel and Kim Kardashian's buttocks. And yet they make mothers around the world ashamed of being "real". A little awful at times, with mental abysses and moral deficits. Just real people.
Yeah, damn, I'm so bad sometimes
I was more than happy about the compliment of my four-year-old son recently. "Mom, sometimes I hate you. But then I love you again." THAT is credible. Quite rightly, the little one sometimes finds me totally shit. I am too. And yet he loves me again afterwards. He regularly forgives me for rushing him too much in the morning because I have planned badly. He keeps getting over the fact that I don't feel like playing Playmobil with him. It doesn't seem to destroy our relationship that sometimes I get louder than the decibel regulation for children's headphones, which would be good, and sometimes because of stupid trifles. One day he will hopefully even have forgotten that once I just threw the contents of his child's surprise ice cream in the trash, although I had promised to take care of it.
Maybe "bad" is sometimes "just right"
The good thing is that love can do a lot – between parents and children anyway. I am sure that if mothers had to be perfect to raise cool people, there would be no cool people at all. Basically, almost everyone can tell a story in which his mother's angel wings have been blown around. BÄM! One never sent her daughter's lovingly crafted postcards to the Tiger Duck Club. No wonder she never won anything. The next one never showed up for her son's soccer game. Another left her offspring believing that her father was the real Superman at night, which brought her a lot of ridicule at school. No maternal achievement, no. Not angelic in approach. But deeply human. There are simply reasons why the film "Bad Moms" is going so well. We all need a little antidote for the Conni mothers in between. So that we are reminded again that mothers are only human. Now all we have to do is teach the rest of humanity. We are very welcome to hate us a little bit, because we can understand that really well.