Drive By of the Day

And, of course, the drive-bys can be funny. Milkbreath and Me has a very smart reply to a comment she received in response to a post in which she compared a small mark on her son's face to a Charlie Chaplin moustache (and wrote paranthetically that she deliberately did not say Hitler's moustache.) The commenter couldn't believe she'd compared "a mark on her child's face to Hitler's moustache" (which, of course, she had not), and her response was both funny and to the point. Here's a brief excerpt from near the end of the post--The one you've been waiting for . . .

Do NOT say "How can a MOTHER X, Y, and Z?!?" It's cowardly. It's passive-aggressive. It's implying that I don't live up to some amorphous ideal of motherhood in your head -- something I know for a fact I CAN'T live up to.

Because the one secret of motherhood I have been privileged to understand is this: you can't do it right. No matter what you do, someone, somewhere, is going to have big problems with it.

But contrary to what you might expect, that is not a depressing thought. It's a liberating thought. If there is no way to do it right, then everything you do must be wrong. And if everything you do is wrong just by default, then you can stop worrying about whether it's wrong. Of course it's wrong! Revel in the wrongness! Because everybody else is wrong too! You're free!