I always say to the children I am often wrong and learn as much from them as they do from me so in a sense being a good mother is not going round suggesting you are God's gift to motherhood, have the hardest job in the world and no one else could do it! You need to be good enough, not perfectionist as someone else said above..You need to know you borrow the children rather than buy, create and control them.
The two poems I like are:
Philip Larkin
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself."
The other which is more positive is:
On Children
Kahlil Gibran
" Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable."
I was rather pleased when the teenagers were quoting Wordsworth (using phones ) at Easter lunch today. My late parents would have liked that.