Tuesday May 22, 2007
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?p=8182099#post8182099
by xaloxe
We are mothers. I remember after DD1 was born asking DH when all the knowledge of motherhood would come to me. I was waiting for this influx of historical memory and information to seep into my brain. But, we are not elephants, we are human mothers. We are not all infectious disease specialists, neurologists, pediatricians, otolarynologists, opthalmologists, plastic surgeons, occupational therapists, chefs, teachers, nutritionists, geneticists… we do not have the combined knowledge of all of these professions plus many more. We are mothers. We are mothers who tend to hold ourselves to too high of standards, and have expectations of ourselves which we will never achieve. We are mothers, and we do the best job we can.
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We can’t blame ourselves for not knowing everything, we shouldn’t even expect too. We can find Dr’s we trust the care of our children too, and who we respect and who respect us. If the Dr’s miss something, are we to blame? Are they? Should we even worry about blame at all and just focus on the here and now? Similiar to your situation, our DD1 also had a couple episodes of seizure-like activity, one in particular which had me calling a number of her specialists immediatly. No one thought to do an EEG, and I didn’t either so it wasn’t done and we are still left wondering.
We all take our experiences in life and learn from it, and use that information in future dealings. We are not all powerful, but we are powerful. Finding that balance is key to squashing the mama-guilt and turing it into mama-advocate.
