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Motherhood "Appraisals"

Dominic spelled this out (with no prompting from me) with his magnetic letters the other day on our fridge:




When I saw this sentence, it got me to thinking, how do you know if you're doing a good "job" at being a mom?  Motherhood is an unpaid job, you don't get $5.00 from your family every time you complete a load of laundry, or wash a bunch of dirty dishes, do you?? If you make a terrific dinner, does your family leave a "tip" on the table? Probably not!  When you are a mom, you're basically "on-call" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. When you work for monetary compensation, unless you're the big boss, you most likely have a performance appraisal at a minimum, once a year.  This is where you're told what areas you're doing well in and areas that you may need to improve on.  There are plenty of people out there that like to dispense their own "appraisal" on how you're doing as a mom,  like the woman that told me once that she would have never let her children act the way Dominic did in public or when another mom asked me when Lauren was about 2 1/2 or so, whether she was going to be going away to college with her pacifier, because she felt Lauren was too old to be using one.  I know that I have certain "areas" that need improvement (like keeping up with the laundry better and not keeping our kitchen counter so cluttered), but nobody's perfect, right?  If your kids, hubby or significant other had to give you a motherhood "appraisal" how would you do? what would your goals be? strengths? weaknesses? would you get all "excellent" ratings? or would you have areas that needed improvement?

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