Mothers

Did you know that there are various types of mothers? It seems like an idea that one never thinks of, but once one starts thinking about it, one realizes - you know what, I already knew that.

Shocked Moms

These are women who defy their own expectations when they have a baby. In some cases, they may find that they scare themselves because of how much they want to leave the baby and move on with their lives. Other women may find themselves sobbing with a blend of grief and joy because they want to be there for their baby all day for years but a year earlier they believed they would return to work like 6 weeks after releasing the baby from the womb and be excited about slimming back into all the clothes they used pre-maternity. Whatever way it goes, shocked Moms are ones who discover that as mothers they are not conforming to their own ideas or that their own images about themselves and about mothers were no better organized than the stuff at the colorful ends of kaleidoscopes.

The good news is that most of those women are able to be functional mothers and at least half end up being able to be good or even excellent mothers despite the sense of having expected one kind of mother only to turn out to be a different kind.

Expected Mothers

These are women who find that they do conform to their own ideas of motherhood and are the kind of mother they had foreseen. Blessed by self-awareness these women do not suffer from cognitive dissonance unless forced to behave in ways that go against how they intended to be as mothers.

These mothers may be less likely to cry early on but more likely to cry at weddings - in truth, that is a guess and is not based on statistical research.

Family Oriented - often SAHMs

Despite the nay sayers roughly 25% of women spend at least some time living as house wives and mothers. The term may rub many women and the men who love them the wrong way, because in some circles it is a phrase used to denigrate women who spend time financially dependent on relatives and devoted to their husbands and/or their child/ren. Not everyone responds to that negatively, but some do.

While Mother's Day has passed us by, earlier in the month, this time I will share the title of book that was reviewed on line as being great for the kinds of women who lived happily as mothers devoted to their families. The book is a novel called The Apple Orchard by Susan Wiggs.