Alpha mom? Slacker? 'Good Enough Mother'?

Constantly beating yourself up about your mothering skills? Feel like you're never doing as good a job as the next mom? Well, here's help. In a new book titled, "Good Enough Mother," journalist and TV personality, René Syler, takes a humorous look at modern-day momhood and offers empathy and advice to help all moms get a little relief. Here's an excerpt:

All Roads Lead to Math

THE THIRD GRADE ALMOST KILLED ME.

Not my third grade experience, mind you, but my kids’. Once I saw their homework — the work sheets covered in figures and fractions — my heart started to thump and my head began to swim. I felt as if I were being haunted by the Ghost of Homework Past.

Since I’m a professional journalist, it may not come as a surprise that I was (and still am) a voracious reader, of anything from the classics to my beloved collection of Nancy Drew books, and I was a more-than-passable English student in school. My friends thought I was nuts, because I liked to write  book reports and keep up with summer reading lists.

But don’t get me started on math.

I hated math.

If you don’t believe me, ask Mr. McCullough, my much-maligned high school math teacher, because I wore out my britches and three desks in his class, one for each year I was there, endlessly failing to understand just what the heck algebra was and why on earth I was plagued enough to have to think about it. Never did the poor guy see any improvement in my algebra skills or in my disposition in (not) dealing with them.

By the time Casey started school, I had had many long years of freedom from figures. Long, lovely years devoid of the need to count anything more taxing than calories.

Which is why I broke into a cold sweat when Casey came home from third grade one fine day and, good girl that she is, sat down with an apple and a cookie and a glass of milk, spread out her homework, and then dropped the bomb.

She needed help with fractions.

Fractions? FRACTIONS! Lord have mercy, there were twenty years of cobwebs filling the minuscule area of gray matter that ever dealt with fractions. Any ability to understand fractions hadn’t been replaced by just cobwebs, but by partying, glasses of wine, childbirth, early morning wake-up calls, and trying to keep Cole from destroying the house. My fraction- capable brain cells — all three and three quarters of them — had long been lost in the Bermuda Triangle of life’s priorities.

Of course I couldn’t tell any of this to Casey, lest she think her mother a completely incompetent booby. But seriously, how on earth do you explain math to an impressionable child when you don’t get it yourself? Or how do you explain that the mere thought of adding anything with a number higher than the ten fingers on my hands triggers the kind of anxiety that cannot be assuaged with my usual “I Don’t Care” mantra?

See, a good-enough mother knows she’s not perfect, that she’s a normal bundle of anxieties and inadequacies and that she has some really finely honed skills and some boneheaded tendencies that usually result in belly flops or fallen soufflés. In other words: She’s human.

But I don’t want my children to think that I can’t succeed at something if I really put my mind to it. Not that I’d expect to come out a gold-medal winner, but I’d expect to do the best I could and that that would be good enough. Just as crucial: They need to know that they’ll succeed as well, if they put their minds to it. It’s also crucial for them to learn that if they don’t succeed, they need to try another tactic to get the goal accomplished.

Teaching these things to children is very hard to do when you’re convinced you’re going to fail. I feel as dizzy when confronted with math homework now as I did whenever Mr. McCullough breezily informed the class that he was springing a pop quiz on us. I knew I would fail then—and I did. Now

whenever I see the figures swimming on the sheet of math homework, I fear I will fail again, even if I really put my mind to it. Moreover, each time I supervise Casey’s doing the equations, I wonder if perhaps this might be the one time when I really and truly will be revealed to be a phony, revealed as a mom who can’t deal with anything and everything, and I will disappoint my children.

As a result, it takes an awful lot of energy for me to put on a cheery face when math homework appears out of the backpacks. I take deep breaths and tell myself that if an eight-year-old can be expected to solve the problems, then a forty-four-year-old mother can at least try to do the same.

So when Casey first needed help with fractions, I hauled out the measuring cups in the kitchen, and tried to figure out how much one half plus three quarters equals. I cracked open a Diet Coke—fervently wishing either that it would turn into a stiff vodka or that my financial-whiz husband would magically appear home early from work—and tried to keep my voice steady as I surveyed Casey’s fraction work sheet.

“See, Mommy,” my sweet Casey said, pointing to some figures. “I don’t know how to multiply the fractions, or divide the fractions. Can you help me?”

Multiply the fractions? Divide the fractions? Ugh—I couldn’t even show her how to add the fractions. And here’s the kicker . . . she had to show her work!

After she went to bed that night, I had a good long soak in the tub, trying to convince myself that a good-enough mother knows enough to look at the bright side. Diagram a sentence, done. Conjugate verbs, I’m there. Bring store-bought cupcakes to class, no problem. I negotiated an uneasy truce with myself, concentrating on my strengths and trying my utmost not to admit that there are still some things I will always suck at. Like fractions.

Wouldn’t you know, just when I was starting to believe I might be able to figure out the dreaded fractions, Casey came home one other fine day with a new way to strike terror into my heart.

That’s right, my old nemesis: long division. 

And now Cole is going through the thirdgrade, so out come the frantic calculations again. I know it’s going to be a whole lot more difficult, not only because geometry is looming and there’s no way I’m ever going to figure that stuff out, but also because Casey is good at sitting down to do her homework, while her dearest brother never saw an assignment he didn’t want to wiggle out of.

To be honest, one of the reasons our rule about homework is “Get it done ASAP” is so I can look forward to a nice dinner and an evening devoid of fractions.

But despite my best efforts, back when Cole was in second grade, nothing could stop a certain something from happening that felt like a hot poker to the gut.

That certain something was a note from the teacher.

And not just any note, nor just any teacher.

This was a note from Mrs. Henry.

The mere sound of Mrs. Henry’s voice was guaranteed to send me into paroxysms of terror. And now she’d sent a note home with Cole. Hands trembling, I carefully plucked the large green Post-it off Cole’s spelling homework.

I think we need to have a conference at your earliest convenience, it read.

My knees practically buckled.

After I quizzed my second-born about the reason for the note, he finally managed to stammer that, well, okay, maybe he did have a homework problem. One that went beyond a math-incompetent mother.

And then there was the matter of the bass. It seemed that he’d tied his shoelaces together and had been bunny-hopping around the music room, one of his preferred school time activities, and, as usual, had lost his balance. While toppling over, he’d nearly busted the school’s upright bass. A bass that cost upward of a cool thousand bucks. That’s a whole lot of weeks of a five-dollar allowance to pay off that debt, I managed to explain to Cole, whose eyes only got bigger and rounder as the specter of NO ALLOWANCE UNTIL HE WAS TWELVE finally wove its way into the dense thicket of his gray matter.

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