Spitfire Words

I am a mother. Telling people this still makes me nervous, and my son is six years old now.

I had him at nineteen.

He lives with my mum.

He stays with me one night a week.

I’m not with his dad anymore, and have no input on his seeing or not seeing his dad.

No, I’m not planning on having him live with me when I graduate uni.

Yes, he knows I’m his mum and I see him regularly.

This is the quiz I answer with virtually everyone I tell about him. It used to be a lot more comprehensive. I felt the need to justify why I broke up with his dad, why he didn’t live with me, why I’d do something so unparental as go to Canada for four months without him. I have good reasons, I explained myself well, but every time I did I felt a little smaller. A little less justified. A little more like a bad person.

I learned by rote the exact details to give people that would make them pity me instead of judge me. I explained every minute detail that helped my case, and each time I did they felt less justifiable.

As time goes on I try my best to resist the urge to explain myself, and nor should I have to explain. I chose not to raise my son myself because it was the best decision I could have made for myself and for my son. And no, I’m not ashamed to list myself as a reason, and no I’m not going to go into detail on why. As I use a more situation appropriate version of this in response to people’s questions I find not only that others judge me less (or at least less openly), but that I judge myself less. That I feel more confident talking about him and the part he plays in my life.

Before, I used to avoid telling people he existed, not prepared for the wash of self-loathing, for the spanish inquisition, for the all over awfulness of revealing that I was a teenage mum. A uni friend of mine knew me for three years without finding out about him.

Now I tell people I have a hilarious, bright, weird six year old who drives me insane and loves to drag me around the museum as often as possible. That I have a wonderful mum who is doing a great job of caring for him and his oddness, and who I love co-parenting with. I tell funny stories about my funny little boy and my unusual family, I show off his numerous selfies (he took his first one aged two) and put his drawings up on my fridge.

The point to this, if there is one, comes back to something I was once told by a therapist. Being ‘good enough’ is not only a reasonable thing to aim for, but a far better one than ‘perfect’. I’m not a perfect mum, not a great mum, but I’m a good enough mum. Rejecting judgement over it from myself and others doesn’t make me a rebel or anything, but it does make me realise how much energy I was wasting worrying about being bad, and how much better of a mum and a person I am when I stop thinking about how much more I should be doing.

It’s a useful and hard learned lesson that I’m still getting to grips with, and one that I hope I can carry over to other areas of my life.

Next up: trying to be a good enough student. Maybe then I can hit my deadlines on time.