I am tempted to fill this with typos and grammar mistakes, just to make a point. A supermoms doesn't need to, and can't be, a perfect mom. We are just people too.
I have had a week full off folie, silly errors, and near exhaustion. This doesn't make me a bad mom, it just makes me busy and means my body is moving faster then my mind. Do I feel dumb? Yes. And I dumb? No.
So far in the last few weeks I have had a series of small mistakes add up to feelings of failure, frustration, and I've even angered some people around me. That only makes it worse, a mistake that affects others is worse then just wearing mismatched shoes (I bet now I will wear mismatched shoes tomorrow...call it self fulfilling prophesy) My plan? Go to bed early with a good book, read until I'm involved in someone else's story, and sleep it off. Every morning is a new start, and a chance to do things better.
It's not been a complete fail of a week. I did manage to visit 3 friends, make it to my meeting (1 minute before I was officially late), scrub my kitchen, bathroom, and get laundry done, as well as clean my living room and control the teddy bear tea party that was taking over. Those were all successes. If I felt worse I would find even smaller successes, like locking my car every time I get out for an entire day (good thing other people know my bad habits and check it when they walk by). By focusing on the successes maybe I won't feel so bad about the failures.
There's another problem. Making a mistake isn't a failure. Not being 10 minutes early doesn't mean I failed, it means I hit an extra red light or two. Missing a corner because I was so focused on the signs I missed the landmarks isn't a fail, it's an oops. However, in my mind anything less then perfection is failure. Go figure, the one issue I thought I had beat has reared it's ugly head to haunt my adulthood as it did my adolescence. I will just keep telling myself everyone makes mistake and hope it helps. Everyone forgets their child's lunch sometime, it's fixing the mistake, and remembering the big stuff (better to forget a lunch then forget a child!) that matters. Life is all about how you manage it when things happen.
The people who get angry, who get frustrated and yell, the ones who make me feel worse about a slip up, they don't help. The guilt definitely makes it worse, and the pressure to be perfect, or to always be on time, or never to leave something at home, that makes more mistakes happen. The feelings they create increases distraction and increases the frequency of mistakes. If everyone could just settle for super and let go of perfection, we would all bounce back sooner and the little things wouldn't seem so horrible.