I had this great plan to start getting to bed really, really early one or two times a week. You know, hop in bed at 8:30, read a little, and then drift off. I have been very tired lately, and this plan was supposed to help me out.

Then along came Erika Schickel. Bitch. I foolishly bought this great book she wrote called “You’re Not the Boss of Me” and I just couldn’t put it down.

Before I was a mom I thought that the only way to be a good parent was to be just like me. Yeah, stop laughing.

Now that I’ve been at this for a little while I have learned to appreciate all different kinds of mothers. Maybe I’ll never be the mom getting a lap dance with a girlfriend, or smoking pot behind the compost pile, or playing Grand Theft Auto, but I LOVE that Erika is that mom AND that her girls seem to be thriving.

She and I have a few things in common (a first name, for example), but mostly we lead very dissimilar lives. Early in my mothering career that would have bugged me, and I wouldn’t have enjoyed the story very much. I would have constantly been looking out for the ways she and I were alike and the ways we were not. I guess I needed to see others like myself as some kind of validation of my choices.

But now I’m probably too tired to care, and I just love reading about mothers. For me the success of this book is that I get to peek into another mother’s life and see how she does it. It isn’t a perfect life full of “correct” choices. Its a life full of being full of life. Go read this book.