What Mean Girls Taught Me About Being Super Mom

There she is, Super Mom. She’s got her little brood of children, all wearing clean clothes, out the door before 9 this morning. She’s tackling the grocery store without one little peep out of her peanut gallery. Her cart is overflowing with organic produce and other healthy foods that will need to be cooked from scratch. And she looks fabulous.

Super Mom.

Based on my description or the one in your own head based on those words, we see the Gold Standard for mommy-dom. A ruler for which to measure ourselves, and a person to aspire to be.

Here’s the thing though. I don’t think we should pin a cape on this mama so quickly.

One of my favorite guilty pleasure movies in Mean Girls which I will watch and then quote mercilessly to my poor husband who starts out half chuckling like “ha ha oh…” and ends more like “not more Mean Girls PLEASE.”

But there is a scene in Mean Girls where after some serious girl-on-girl crime occurs, that Cady is awarded the title of Spring Fling Queen and she realizes they are all beautiful and wonderful and important. So she breaks apart her crown and give pieces to everyone.

(Here, watch it, it’s beautiful. I’ll wait.)

Ok, great, you’re finished. So remember when I said we shouldn’t rush to pin a cape on our imagined Super Mom just yet? This scene is a perfect example as to why.

What Mean Girls Taught Me About Being Super Mom

We all bring something to mommy table. Where I have some mommy strengths, some one else may have some room for growth. And where I have room for growth, I know there are mommies out there totally rocking their skills. Where I struggle and need to grow, I pray there is a mommy out there who not only has the gifting to do this, but also the gifting to walk me through it very slowly.

By pinning the cape on one mom, the shiny mom, the she-seems-to-have-it-all-together mom, we are choosing to not recognize the best things about each mom, including ourselves.

We live in a Pinterest-inspired, social-media-snapshot, my-kid-better-not-embarrass-me world. It helps set high standards and even higher expectations. These snapshots lead us to believe that if we could just have the image in that picture, we’d be all set.

It may even lead us to believe that her marriage or her parenting or her kids or her whatever are more desirable than our whatever.

What if we saw the Super Mom cape as more of the every day momiform of spit-up covered yoga pants? And when we saw another mom in her spit-up covered momiform, we could air high five or pay for her coffee?

Because she is Super Mom. You are Super Mom. I am Super Mom.

Each day that we get up, ask for an extra measure of God’s grace and patience, and then raise our babies to the best of our ability, each of those days we are Super Mom.

So don’t rush to pin a cape on just one mom. Choose to see the cape billowing behind each mom.