Follow up to my crappy mother column

It's good to write a column about fears that you're a crappy mother, because loads of other mothers share the ways in which they're crappy, too!  For instance, on Facebook friends wrote:

• "Recently I celebrated the fact that my daughter didn't have the iPad for one minute. For a whole day. Read into that the truism that usually she has it many minutes. I only started feeling better when I started practicing 'good enough' parenting. Benign neglect, baby."
• "Mothers in the mythical 50s got blamed for coddling their children, mothers today are blamed for raising entitled children - we're pretty much damned to be doing it wrong, no matter what we're doing."
• "Lately, one of my frequent interior monologues involves the phrase, 'there's good, and there's good enough.' It's pretty fitting for lots of situations -- house cleanliness levels, kid cleanliness levels, number of books read to children, number of minutes spent speed reading Berry Bitty Bakers, number of times I raised my voice in a day, number of times I raised my voice in an hour...you get the picture!"
• "It's all part of the same conspiracy of trying to snow the masses into the idea that 'perfect' and 'happy' exist but it's always on THAT side of the fence. Divide and conquer baby."

Good enough.  Benign neglect.  THAT side of the fence.  These are mothers who are recognizing that there are narratives out there that are unhealthy, and that are specifically targeting mothers.  And they're developing strategies for keeping those narratives from being effective.  I soooo appreciate their strategies.  I'm borrowing them.

And on to another motherhood thing.  The other day I wrote a post where the bike riding was a simile for life. Shitty bike riding and good bike riding, and on that day I was definitely in a place of shitty bike riding.  I mentioned that one sign of a good bike day was when Maybelle sang a song she wrote with alternative lyrics to the Beatles "The End."

Here was a day of good bike riding:

Bicycle song from Maybelle on Vimeo.

(In case you can't understand:  "Oh yeah, alright, are you gonna go on the bike? Okay.  Oh yeah, alright, are you gonna go on the bike?  Good job.")