Product Description

In an ideal world, mothers would have time to hand-sew their kids' costumes for the school play, prepare all-organic meals, and volunteer in the classroom at the drop of a hat. In reality, most moms have to settle for plopping their little ones in front of SpongeBob so that they can prepare yet another chicken nugget-based dinner, guiltily convinced they're falling down on the job.

In Good-Enough Mother, René Syler pulls back the curtain to reveal the truth about modern mothering and reassure time-stressed moms that even if their children are strangers to made-from-scratch cookies, they can emerge as happy, well-adjusted, fully functioning members of society. Mother to two great kids of her own, Syler explains how she learned to chuck perfection for practicality -- in short, how she became a Good-Enough Mother. She shows other women seeking to balance family, work, and some semblance of a personal life how to happily join the ranks of Good-Enough Mothers, who occasionally serve breakfast for dinner yet give their children plenty of what really matters -- love, time, and support.

Each essay provides welcome empathy and sage advice on navigating life's different obstacles, whether it's dealing with annoying Supermoms, bluffing through a third grader's math homework, or coping with the words that strike terror into every parent's heart ("Your son's teacher on line one"). Offering real wisdom tempered with humor and warmth, Good-Enough Mother will have every modern mom laughing in relief and recognition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #647170 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
All mothers want to provide their kids the perfect childhood; as such, many try to become the perfect mother. In this humorous look at modern momhood, journalist and TV personality Syler uses her own experience as a working mom of two to show how "good-enough" is the new "perfect." Each short, punchy chapter is focused loosely on a parenting topic, including spouse management, math homework, assigning chores, taking time out for friends and "flunking the PTA." Syler believes in teaching by example, a strategy she uses on her kids and her readers; in honest, conversational prose, Syler gets very personal, giving readers plenty of lengthy glimpses into the life of a minor celebrity. Though it doesn't add a whole lot to the exploding mommy-memoir canon, this will make a satisfying read for any woman who knows what it's like to scramble through the day raising children, working full time and hoping her efforts are good enough.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
René Syler has been an anchor of CBS's The Early Show. She is an active member of the National Association of Black Journalists. Syler is married to Buff Parham, with whom she has two children.

Karen Moline is a journalist, novelist, and ghostwriter. She has worked on a wide variety of bestselling books. Moline lives in New York City with her son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 21

mothering my mother

One day when Cole was eight and being his usual charming self, I told him, "Hey, man, don't try pulling the wool over my eyes. I've been eight years old before and I know what it's like."

That worked for, oh, maybe a minute, and then it was back to more of the same. So I ended up saying the one thing to Cole that my mother used to always say that drove my sister and me crazy: "I do so much for you guys, the least you could do is..."

Omigod, I'm turning into my mother!

I suspect that nearly all moms think this from time to time. Okay, I bet that 100 percent of all moms know this is true. So much of the way we parent is learned from our own mothers -- the good and the bad.

The good is that my mom's such an interesting character, part Iroquois Indian, beautiful and creative and independent. She'd never hesitate to get down on the floor and play cards with my sister and me. I always knew how much she loved me with a fierce, unconditional love. She believed in me and encouraged me to strive for the best I could be, and comforted me when I had a hard time being the school wallflower and late bloomer.

The bad was that toward the end of their marriage, Mom and Dad fought in front of us. A lot.

To be fair, of course, my mom had her hands full with me and my sassiness. When I was twelve and those hormones were starting to kick in, I decided that I was going to stay a tomboy since all things girly really got on my nerves. I loudly declared that I hated my first name, Michelle, and that I was going to change it to Mike. Well, Mom took all the helium out of my balloon when she told me to go right ahead, since her own deep, dark secret was that her real name was Florence (and yes, she will KILL me for putting that in print), and she never liked it so she used Anne instead. Crushed,

I went with my middle name, René, as an alternative -- because I certainly wasn't going to stick with Mike if Mom gave it her blessing!

After the Mike incident, though, I don't think Mom ever quite figured out the force that she was up against.

Compounding my orneriness was the undeniable fact that my parents stayed married for twenty-four years, probably about four too many. When my mom ultimately decided that her marriage could no longer survive, my parents separated, and Dad moved out. Mom had to move to Southern California to revive her career in her midforties as a military reserve recruiter, and Tracy and I stayed put so we could finish our schooling.

Suddenly we were parentless. I was eighteen and Tracy was sixteen. I had started college, yet was weighted with the responsibilities of taking charge of my sister and managing the house. Trust me, I didn't want to be in charge.

Fortunately for both of us, Tracy soon went to stay with Mom. Unfortunately for both of us, Dad soon became very, very sick.

Actually, he hadn't been well for a long time. He'd already survived breast cancer, as one of the roughly fifteen hundred cases diagnosed in men each year. I remember very little about it, because I was only about twelve when he was diagnosed. I do remember that I was young enough to still be embarrassed by the word "breast."

For reasons unknown to me now, my father chose to have a radical mastectomy. Again, I remember little about the operation, but a lot more about his recovery. He had a horrific scar that stretched from under his armpit to his sternum. It made him look concave and lopsided.

I also remember my mother chiding him to do the exercises the doctor prescribed so he wouldn't have a limited range of motion on that side. Dad, as stubborn as he was, didn't do the exercises, and he could lift his arm only as high as his shoulder for the remainder of his life.

But there still are several things I do remember quite vividly about my dad. He was an excellent provider, but he suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. He recuperated from a mild stroke. By the time I was a teen, breast cancer was just another item to add to his long list of ailments.

Right before he died, Dad went to the hospital because he needed to change his medication, and it couldn't be done on an outpatient basis. While there, he took a turn for the worse, and the doctor told me that I had better call whatever family I had to be with him because it wasn't looking good.

I grabbed the phone to call Mom, and she was still so angry at him about everything that had gone wrong between them that she said she wasn't going to come see him. My blood started to boil. There I was at twenty-three, already stressed to the max with full-time studies and my exhausting job as a waitress, barely managing to make ends meet, with Dad nearing the end. So I told Mom in no uncertain terms that she had to come up to Sacramento and say good-bye.

She grudgingly came up with my sister and spent some time with Dad. Later that night he had a massive stoke, and he died a few weeks later. He was only fifty-nine.

Along with the grief I felt for the loss of my father, I also mourned the loss of innocence I'd had to endure because I'd had to so painfully mother my mother.

As any mother of a daughter knows, the mother-daughter relationship is incredibly complex. I believe it is also much more difficult to manage than a mother-son relationship. I love my mom to death, but there's a weird sort of dichotomy because she's never been one to embrace the changing of our relationship. To her I will always be her little-bitty girl. This was kind of hard to take when I was parenting my sister as a teen myself, or having to beg my mom to come as my dad lay dying. Back then this little-bitty girl was plenty dang pissed at her mom for acting like a little-bitty girl herself.

As I graduated from college and threw myself wholeheartedly into moving forward in my career, our relationship finally made a calm, natural progression. I didn't love my mom any less, but I needed her less. I was working, I could take care of my own bills (once I took them out of the shoe box in the closet and actually paid them), and basically I grew up and became fully self-actualized. At this point Mom tried to treat me like a grown-up -- sort of. She didn't succeed, but I was able to let it go, and since we didn't spend huge chunks of time together, or live in the same city, we developed a smoother and less-charged bond.

When Casey was born, the first thing my mother said was, "This child is not calling me Grandma." In her mind Grandma was someone who sat in a rocking chair with a scowl on her face and her hair coiled in a little gray bun.

"My name is Meema," Mom declared.

In 1997, when I was three months pregnant with my son, I was in a blissful state of mind. My life was progressing swimmingly. I was the perfect mom to my daughter and the perfect daughter to my mom. (Note sarcasm.)

Then came the call.

It was late December and Mom was on the phone, sounding calm and unruffled even as she asked if I was sitting down. I told her I was. Then she dropped a lightning bolt from out of the blue. She'd been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Through my shock I asked myself, How could that be? Anne Syler, who was sixty-five at the time, and who had always been healthy, who ate a well-balanced diet before nutritionists chided us all to do the same (don't get me started on her penchant for aloe vera juice), and who exercised regularly before it was all the rage, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. But, unfortunately, breast cancer can strike anyone, and my mom had become just another one of the more than two hundred thousand women who are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the United States.

Once again, breast cancer became an unwelcome member of my family.

Mom went on to tell me that it was a good news/bad news type of situation. The bad news was the breast cancer diagnosis. The good news was that it was caught very early, thanks to her regularly scheduled mammogram and an eagle-eyed radiologist. So it was a tiny stage-zero breast cancer. Frankly, if you're going to get cancer, this is the kind you want to get. Cancers at this stage are less than a centimeter in diameter, and the survival rate for stage-zero breast cancer is almost 100 percent.

I didn't know that yet. My mind was reeling. The thing about a cancer diagnosis is that once you hear about the

Big C, many times you don't hear anything else.

You are convinced that the Big C equals the Big D.

Death.

Which, thank goodness, is something I now know to be not true -- with one notable caveat: The Big C must be detected early, as it had been with my mom. She could be the poster child for early detection and the vital importance of a regular, yearly mammogram.

After meeting with her doctors and doing a bit of her own research, Mom told me she was going to go for the lumpectomy, followed by six weeks of radiation. No way was I going to permit her to make this decision entirely on her own, so I insisted that I wanted to speak to her doctor and help her figure out what to do.

Off we went on this journey for which we had no road map -- just feeling around in the dark. I became the wingman (wingwoman?) in my mom's dogfight. I'm what the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation people call a co-survivor.

For me the journey was fraught with anxiety, as I, the perfect daughter, was living and working in Dallas at the time, and Mom lived in San Antonio. So I immediately hauled my bloated carcass onto a plane to San Antonio, to be with her and to meet her doctor. It was then that I removed the crown of perfection and put on the news-gathering hat. And with my pen and paper in hand, I began to quiz the oncologist about my mom's cancer and her treatment options.

First we heard about the stages of breast cancer more advanced than my mom's: Stage-one breast cancer has a 95 percent five-year survival rate. Chances are extremely high that you're going to be all right.

Stage-two breast cancer shows a pretty big drop. The five-year survival rate is about 85 percent.

Stage-three breast cance...

Customer Reviews

A delightful look at motherhood!
I absolutely loved this book! It is so nice to know that even celebrity moms struggle with many of the same trials that the rest of us face daily. In a society where women are expected to be "SUPER WOMEN," Rene reassures us that it's okay to be human! As I read the book, I found myself laughing out loud - a must-read for the overworked mother! I am recommending this book to all of my "mommy" friends.

Good Idea, But Kind of Repetitive
I liked the basic premise of the author admitting that she has flaws and shortcomings in the motherhood department. As women, we often measure our self-worth by comparing ourselves to others, so it's always comforting to read that there's another mother out there who also feels like she isn't perfect. However, there are only so many chapters I can read about this topic. It seemed like EVERY chapter was the same: some anecdote about the antics of the author's children, a cutesty self-depricating remark about the author's foibles in the face of said antics, and then the author bragging that she came through when it really counted.

You're not alone!
Just to know that I, a mother who loves her kids, but is not a perfect person, am not alone in my quest to just "break even" a a "good enough mom" is refreshing. It seems like there are so many stories where mothers are either disgustingly (and not to mention, unrealistically) adept or on the other hand, completly incapable. I was so greatful to finally have someone with whom I can connect!