When I was pregnant with my first child, everyone told me “you’re going to be such a good mom!” And I believed them. I’d had LOTS of practice. I spent my teens taking care of younger siblings. I had nannied twin toddler boys, and worked as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant. By the time I started incubating my own, I had been taking care of other people’s babies for a good fifteen years. I was groomed for this, I was experienced, I was totally going to be a good mom. But my mom, in her wisdom, gave me a better piece of encouragement. She said “Honey, you are going to mess this up. And when you do, it’s going to be okay.”* Mom knew something that I was about to find out. No one starts out good at this. Everyone starts out bad at this. I had changed hundreds of diapers, followed parenting blogs, did everything I could think of to prepare myself for this life. If anyone was going to start out good at this, it would have been me. Now, go ahead and ask me. “Emma, did you start out good at this?” No. I also started out bad at this. I pulled into my driveway and realized my baby wasn’t buckled in. More than once. I left her crying in her crib until noon one day because I was answering emails and lost track of time. I let her suffer through a bleeding diaper rash because I forgot to pack the diaper rash cream for our camping trip, and I was too embarrassed to borrow some. I thought she had suddenly become “colicky” until her doctor’s appointment revealed that she hadn’t gained any weight because I wasn’t making enough milk and the reason she cried all the time was because SHE WAS HUNGRY. These are rookie mistakes that made me feel like a bad mom. And this is why it’s important to distinguish between “mom” and “caregiver.” I wasn’t a bad mom. I was a beginner caregiver. Rookie mistakes in caregiving are going to happen, and when we translate those rookie caregiving mistakes as failings in our relationship as a mom, it produces a lot of guilt. How heartbroken would you be if your child thought that every time they made a mistake it meant they were a bad person? That’s how heartbroken I feel for my past self. She believed that caregiving mistakes meant that she was a bad mother. I wish I knew then how to forgive myself and keep going. In the next chapter, we’re going to talk about how this guilt is what makes us feel like we’re being judged all the time (it’s so hard not to skip ahead to that part, because feeling judged is a huge burden and I’m excited for you to let it go. In fact, if that’s what you need today, go ahead and skip to the next chapter and then come back. No one’s looking, it’s okay.) In the chapter after that, we’re going to talk about how trying to be perfect and feeling judged for not being perfect often leads to us turning away the help we desperately need. It’s all related, people. But first, we gotta talk about how good moms can give themselves grace by accepting their rookie status as a caregiver. GOOD MOM, ROOKIE CAREGIVER In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell shares some interesting research about success. Turns out, natural talent is almost nonexistent. Humans are rarely “good” or “bad” at anything, they are only practiced or un-practiced. Here’s what that looks like. Joey likes to draw, and he spends two hours a day drawing because it brings him joy, and he gets better and better at it, and we call it his “natural talent.” But if you pay Lisa, who doesn’t like to draw, to practice drawing for three hours a day, guess what happens? After a while, Lisa appears to have more “natural talent” purely on the basis of her having more practice. I believe with all my heart that you want to be the world’s best caregiver, because you love your baby and you want your baby to HAVE the best caregiver. If we had the option to upload care-skills from the matrix, we would! We absolutely would. But that’s not how this works. Everyone has to start at the beginning. We don’t get to skip ahead to the part where we have decades of experience. Say it with me, friend. “Everyone starts out bad at this.” Again, that doesn’t make you a bad mom. If you forget to buckle in your baby, that makes you a rookie caregiver. If seeing that she’s not buckled freaks you out, you’re a good mom. If you don’t buckle your baby on purpose because her safety doesn’t matter to you, then you’re a rookie caregiver AND a bad mom. Bad moms exist. I have met them. If you’re wondering whether you’re a bad mom, stop. Bad moms do not read a book about how to be a good mom. The difference between a good mom and a bad mom is that good moms want to be better moms. Good moms are not magically more talented are caregiving. Natural “mom-talent” doesn’t exist.** All moms start out as rookie caregivers. Good moms are self-motivated to practice their caregiving skills, just like Joey was self-motivated to practice drawing. When you look at other moms and are tempted to think “they are a better mom than me,” stop and say this instead: “They are a more practiced mom than me.” I promise you. You will out start bad at this, and you will learn and grow and practice and over time you will become the caregiver that you always wanted to be. So let’s cancel the good-mom/bad-mom paradigm and trade it in for growth mindset. WHAT IS GROWTH MINDSET? Growth mindset means we embrace the amazing human ability to change. We can form new habits, learn new skills, master our impulses. We can become a new self, and leave behind the old self. We are not stuck like this forever. The term “growth mindset” is newish, but – like most “new” things – the concept itself is timeless. 600 years before the birth of Christ, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “One constant since the beginning of time might be change.” You aren’t one thing. You are a living, changing human being. You picked up this book because you know that you have the ability to incorporate what you read on this page into how you live, thereby becoming a slightly different person. If you thought that you were incapable of becoming anything other than who you are in this moment, then you wouldn’t be reading a book about how to be something else. You sought out information that supports you in the transformation from who you are today to who you want to become. And now we segue to the topic of apprenticeship. Because the support required to assist you in decades of growth cannot be contained in one book.*** WHAT APPRENTICESHIP LOOKS LIKE My husband is an engineer for a robotics company, and he’s always complaining that he “has to” attend training. He “has to” eat donuts and spend all day at a Hilton learning how to be better at his job. He doesn’t have to take anyone to the bathroom, or ask them every ten minutes if they have to go to the bathroom, or make sure he’s got a change of clothes handy in case something unexpected happens (something that should have happened in the bathroom.) All he has to do is sit there and be nurtured as a skilled professional. Good companies care about investing in their people – growing them from a small asset to a big asset. The work we do as caregivers and domestics is no less in need of nurturing and training. I present Exhibit A – Titus 2:3-5 in which Titus encourages the older women of the early church to be good examples and teach the younger women how to love their husbands and children and be “busy in the home.” When I first read that, it struck me that being busy in the home wasn’t the only thing that young wives needed to be taught how to do. They also needed an experienced woman to teach them how to “love their husbands and children.” So, apparently, even love isn’t something we do entirely on instinct. It’s something we have to learn. From women who are good at it. (Excuse me, “more practiced” at it.) What people expect us to do perfectly, from the day our baby is born, on “maternal instinct,” turns out to be a learned skill that we apprentice in from other women. They are the experts. We are the apprentices. Logically, it follows that in order to learn from them, we need to be in touch with these women. And… that’s a problem. HOW IT USED TO BE Training in the domestic arts used to happen organically, the way it did for me. I grew up taking care of younger siblings, cousins and neighborhood kids. Few of my friends had siblings much younger than themselves, and didn’t live close enough to younger cousins to be part of their daily lives. Then, I moved away. That’s kind of a new thing, as far as social structure goes. For much of history, most women stayed in the village where they were raised and had the benefit of experienced moms nearby to coach them day in and day out in the ways of keeping a home and raising a family. Western society just isn’t structured like that anymore. I’m a third generation stay-at-home mom, and that’s very rare. Half of our generation had career moms, and most of our generation ARE career moms. Because of urbanization and social mobility, it’s far more common now to leave the town where you grew up. And it’s quickly becoming common for the women who stay in their hometown to see their parents move away. And although some parenting advice is timeless, the nitty gritty stuff is not. Things have changed so drastically since we were kids, we’re parenting in new territory. Experienced moms today don’t have advice for how to police screen time or accommodate autism. They joke about the lack of seatbelts and carseats when they were growing up and say “and we were FINE!” Meanwhile, motor vehicle fatalities for children under 13 have dropped from over 3600 in 1975 to 844 in 2019. I think this is why we moms take to the internet – social, blogs, online magazines, etc. We can sense that our apprenticeship is missing. Raising tiny humans is too important for there not to be a system in place that teaches us how to do this. The truth is, sister, you and I are raising kids in an era where we don’t have as much contact with the women who have experience, and the experience they have is limited to the challenges of their own era. New challenges are uncharted. We have to be intentional about seeking out apprenticeship in this work of caregiving, or else we end up scrounging around for the crumbs of a bygone apprenticeship system that has fallen apart. We ask experienced moms what they did to save money, and they say “I made my own clothes.” That’s no longer cheaper than buying clothes. It’s actually quite expensive. We ask them whether they vaccinated their kids, and they say “all we had was the polio and measles vaccines.” True story. My mom used to earn extra money by making pies for a local coffee shop. Not just pies, she made chocolate mousse pie – an unbaked frozen mousse made with heavy cream and raw eggs, laid into an Oreo cookie crust, and this is something people bought to go with their afternoon cup of coffee (because, Minnesota, doncha know). She walked in off the street one day with a chocolate mousse pie and offered them a slice. The owners tasted it and said “yes, we’ll take four pies a week, please.” No questions. No dairy, gluten, or vegan considerations, no food handlers permit or commercial kitchen license. She just brought them in once a week and made $20 each, and that’s in 1996 money. I’m sure the coffee shop would have made the pies themselves if they had the recipe, but this was before Google was even invented. You either had a recipe, or you didn’t. And they didn’t. That. Doesn’t. Work. Anymore. We’re grasping at random snippets of advice, trying to piece together a quilt that in previous generations was a full blanket handed down from one mom to another. We can’t reverse the changes of the last 40 years. We can’t bring back the village as it used to be. But now that we see the void, we can fill it. FILLING THE VOID When my sister in law was a new mom, she had anxiety when my brother went to work and left her alone with the baby. “I’m afraid that something will go wrong and I won’t know what to do,” she told me. “Mark just has a better handle on emergency situations.” I said “Aarika, Mark was a lifeguard. He took classes. He knows what to do because he was trained.” So we made an agreement to take an infant CPR class together. (Which, I highly recommend.) It is absolutely insane to me that women beat themselves up for not being an expert in things they have no training for. Me? I suck at home décor. I cannot put together two colors that look like friends. But for a long time, I thought that since I’m a homemaker, I SHOULD be good at home decor, because I have a HOME to decorate, and I have friends who ARE brilliant at home décor (Aarika being one of them), therefore I expected to be an expert too? Automatically? Without training or practice. Just, by instinct. By virtue of having a vagina. And, since I am not, I spent years feeling very disappointed in myself. Until the day I realized two things. First – my friends who are good at home décor are not the standard that I’m failing. They are not a judgment on my lack of skills. They are the mentors who I can go to for guidance. Because (here’s that growth mindset) I am a beginner capable of getting better at it with training and practice. If you haven’t been taught something, don’t beat yourself up for not knowing it. If you haven’t practiced something, don’t beat yourself up for not being perfect at it. Can we agree to remind ourselves and eachother of this? Like, often? In section 3, we’ll get into HOW to find apprenticeship that supports your growth as a domestic and caregiver. But before we add more to your plate, we’re going to take something very heavy off of it to make room. The second I realized? Is that... yeah, I actually don’t care if my house is decorated. I just thought other people cared if my house is decorated. Turns out, other people don’t care, either. That’s why the next chapter is about how to not feel judged. ……………………………………………….. Challenge: wear clothes that fit Time to be real. We’re going to apply growth mindset to your wardrobe. You might be one of those girls who fits back into her favorite jeans the day she comes home from the hospital. If that’s you, I love you but you’re a freak of nature. The rest of us have to dress our new bodies, sometimes for years, and we don’t wanna. Buying bigger clothes feels like giving up. We squeeze into our old stuff, thinking it’ll motivate us to loose the baby weight. We think “I’m sure I can get back down to my wedding weight in a few weeks, I don’t need to waste money on buying a larger size.” As a former personal stylist, one of the hardest things to convince a client to do is buy clothes the next size up. This is a fantastic fashion hack, by the way. Wearing clothes that are slightly large will make you look smaller and feel better. But a woman who is used to being a size 8 DOES NOT want to buy size 12 clothes because that makes her a SIZE 12 WOMAN. The number takes on a grander scope of meaning than it deserves, like you’ve somehow gone from the woman who buys an organic smoothie after hot yoga to the woman who binge-eats Oreos while watching reruns of Spongebob Squarepants (as if skinny girls don’t do exactly that, come on). That’s why some brands cheat their sizes so that a size 10 woman fits into their size 8 dress - they are selling her an identity and SHE WILL BUY IT. Ladies. You are a woman. Wearing clothes. The size? It is fake. It’s a made-up number. It doesn’t mean anything about you as a person. Buying larger clothes means only one thing - that you need bigger clothes than you used to. Size has more to do with the amount of sleep you’re getting than the amount of food you’re eating. You might not love everything about your body, but she did make a baby and that’s kind of a miracle. So do yourself a favor and buy the clothes that fit the body you have today. ……………………………... *You should know, when my mom gave me this advice, we both laughed really hard. REALLY hard. She knew I could handle the truth, and I was honestly relieved. **Some women have personalities that are more suited to the caregiver lifestyle, but if that’s not you it doesn’t mean you weren’t meant to be a mom. It means that the caregiving part of motherhood is going to be really hard for you if you’re trying to do it the same way everyone else does. In the next few chapters, I’ll share how I became a divergent caregiver because the traditional way was killing my soul. ***for those that would argue “except the Bible,” the Bible is 66 books. Calm down.