A Good Enough Welcome

All Good Enough Mamas (GEMs) are invited to participate in this blog. Please, send us your essays about what makes a mama "good enough," or your personal stories about being good enough, or your realizations about how trying to be more than "good enough" will make a good woman crazy. (See "Submissions" in the side bar to the left.) Or, just add your comments to the essays you find here.

GEMs feel the pressure to be perfect, or super, or even just really "great" mamas. We know a love for our children that has a depth and commitment beyond any other relationships we have. They are joy and wonder and love incarnate. They enrich our lives immeasurably. We would die for them. We can't imagine -- and most of the time, wouldn't want to, and try not to, imagine -- life without them.

So, there. Consider it already said. Here, you don't have to prove all of that first before you go on to say that sometimes they also make life a little (or a lot) harder than it was before them.

The voices that call us to a more perfect ideal of motherhood than we can deliver may come from our children, partners, parents, or culture -- and certainly, and most significantly, they come from within. They tell us our job is to keep our children from all harm, all disappointment, all illness, and all neuroses -- and to do it always with patience, resourcefulness, quick wits, creativity, self-sacrifice, and good cheer.

But, knowing that we will inevitably fall short of that, we ask this question: What is a good enough mama?

How do YOU answer that question?