How good a mum are you ... really?

The writer realises that sometimes she needs to pull back and look at the big picture, instead of sweating the small stuff.

Do you feel like an under-achieving mum?

I do. Every day. As soon as my elder girl was born and put on my breast to suckle, I asked myself: “Do you know what you’re doing?” I am still asking that today.

Everyone and everything conspires to tell me I am not doing enough. Sure I enrolled my kid in music class, but did I forget about the baby ballet, baby gymnastics and baby computer classes? Yes, I bought that blocks set, but did I get the one that has the secret superpower of bestowing intelligence because some genius thought to stamp the names of the 118 elements of the periodic table on all sides of the blocks?

There’s even an iPad application called Supermom, which lets you compete with “rival supermoms” to see who is the better mother. As my friend aptly put it, she got stressed just looking at the game.

I am by no means a completely laidback mother. There are things that I insist upon for my kids – that they go to a good school, watch appropriate TV shows, eat healthy food, learn five musical instruments each, and possibly one day win some kind of lifetime achievement award. I think my “demands” on my kids are what any parent would want from theirs.

But I don’t count to the precise day my kids learnt to talk, walk, write, read, and promptly compare it with the international benchmark, or worse, compare it with other mothers.

I don’t insist my kids learn to read at 18 months just because some company selling flash cards says that they can. So what if they can, do they need to?

Also, who cares about reading when right now, I have bigger parenting fish to fry.

Bedtime. It’s my Everest. Bedtime has always been bittersweet for me. The hour right after my kids have slept is my personal nirvana. Suddenly, I am myself again – I can read, watch TV and eat like a sane person. Best of all, I have the luxury of doing absolutely nothing.

But, and this is a big but, bedtime is also a place of loss for me. I always say I “lost” my elder kid to her grandmother right around the time that I was pregnant with my second. My second pregnancy was harder than the first, and I was falling asleep on my toes around 5pm every day. So for a few months, I had to let her grandmother put her to bed. From then on, she had never let me do it, until very recently, when she would let me pat her to sleep occasionally. By occasionally, I mean once a month.

So I was adamant that I wouldn’t lose my younger one’s bedtime. It was a war I was determined to win. From the day she was born, I put her to bed every night, without fail. No matter how tired I was, how difficult she was, how long it took (sometimes it took two hours!), I did it. When I had to go out at

night, I would make sure I put her to bed first.

It was sweet victory!

Then it happened. I don’t know how, when or why, but it crept up. It started with her sneakily extending her bedtime; she wanted to play with her sister before bed. Then she asked whether she could go to bed with her sister, and have their grandmother put them both to bed. Pretty please? OK, just tonight, I said.

Before I knew it, it happened more frequently, and now, every night! I became a spectator once again, skimming the fringes of bedtime, unable to partake of this most basic responsibility.

It’s dramatic, I know. You see, some mothers measure parenting success by their kids’ academic achievement, social skills, musical prowess and so forth. I measure mine by my ability to put my kids to bed. On both counts, I have failed. But I will continue fighting the good fight.

Because there are good days. The other day, my elder child suddenly gave me a hug and said: “I’m really glad that you’re our mummy. Because you sayang (love) us a lot!”

Bawl!

Of course, in the same breath, she also told me that she still prefers it when her grandmother puts her to bed.

Bawl!

So if you ask me if I have the secret to motherhood, I would say no. Do I always know how to steer them in the right direction? No. Do I always make the right choices for them? No. But it’s OK. In the bigger scheme of things, the stuff I fret over probably counts for one or two per cent of the outcome.

Am I always a good mother? On a scale of one to 10, I hover between four and five. Most days, I just pray that I don’t damage them too much.

Mum-of-two Elaine Dong thinks she is a good enough mother on most days. She blogs at www.angelolli.com.