My Encounter with the WORST Mom

One summer day, I packed up my kids and dogs and went to our local park to enjoy some healthy, homemade tacos with grass-fed beef and locally grown veggies on jicama tortillas. For dessert, we ate fresh organic watermelon that I geometrically sliced and de-seeded.

After finishing our nutritious tacos and watermelon, we all took our fish oil pills with high pH water. Then, of course, I put two different essential oils on my each of my girls’ spines and on the bottoms of their feet and sprayed them each with my homemade, natural bug spray that also helps purify the environment. 

As this was happening, I noticed another mom walk past us while feeding her baby a bottle. I know, I thought about calling CPS too. Don’t you know breast is best, lady?! 

I knew she probably wasn’t a great mom, but I didn’t know how bad she was until I saw her older child eating goldfish crackers (not the healthy alternative made out of organic beans — like, the legitimate cheap ones made of God-knows-what that you buy from Walmart). 

She stopped at a picnic table next to us and pulled out a plastic bottle (chock-full of BPA, I’m sure) of that disgusting chemical death mix some call sunscreen. I cringed as she lathered up her kids. “Hope you like cancer,” I murmured to myself. 

Before she let her kids play, I noticed she handed each a NON-organic juice box, probably loaded with sugar — which I’m sure will directly contribute to their future type 2 diabetes. 

Then, as her kids ran to play, I saw how bad this mom really was. One of her kids was wearing pajamas, one had on mismatched shoes, and one was wearing a long-sleeved Christmas shirt, shorts, and rain boots. Not to mention, it looked as if they hadn’t had their tangled, messy hair washed in a week or so. 

Is there any way these poor kids will live past 12?? 

Just as I was processing this horrific scene, I turned around to see my youngest child put a dirt-covered toy in his mouth, my middle daughter happily let our dog lick some leftover taco meat off her face, and my oldest sneeze into another child’s mouth. 

So, as I was thinking to myself, “I guess those goldfish crackers aren’t really that bad after all,” would you believe I heard that bad mom at the picnic table next to me mutter to herself under her breath, “Wow, someone needs to take better care of her kids”?!?

Isn’t it crazy the pressure we sometimes put on others and even on ourselves?!

Sometimes I feel this crazy need to explain certain choices to other moms so they won’t look down on me. “My kids chose their own outfits today!” “She’s eating that because she hasn’t had sugar in a few days.” “We only partially vaccinate because [insert 45-minute explanation as I sweat through my shirt].” “I think the toy was only on the floor for a few seconds, and my baby really needs it, so I’ll just clean it really good before giving it back to her.” (Fake intense wiping toy in my shirt, which does no good at all.)

There are seasons in motherhood when my kids watch very little TV and eat five servings of veggies a day, and then there are seasons when we basically eat only white Great Value pasta, watch hours of TV in a row, and just do whatever we have to to keep everyone alive.

May we give grace to moms who have different priorities, different experiences, different resources, and different pressures than we do — not to mention recognize that as moms we all have those really ugly, hard days and even sometimes rough seasons that seem to last forever.

Let’s face it, we are all sometimes that mom who lets her kids eat a huge order of salty, heart-stopping fries drowned in sugary ketchup while watching a show on our phone just so we can sit in silence for one freakin’ minute.