What To Expect When You Have No Expectations:

I vividly remember the day I realized I was an unfit mother. It was about a year and a half ago. My little sister probably remembers it well too. This is what she heard when she checked her voicemail messages:

"Michelle, it's Amber. I'm gonna need you to come over the second you get off work. I am done being a mom. You may think Cora is cute, but today cute doesn't cut it. She managed to take her very dirty diaper off while 'taking a nap,' but don't worry, none of it got on the floor because there wasn't any poop left over after she smeared it all over the door. Oh and then my diaperless child proceeded to pee all over her carpet, write in fabulous blue ink all over our new leather couch and then, in an attempt to clean off the ink, dump an entire glass of milk all over the same couch. And this was all in the last hour. So please, come. Now. You might have to drive up and down the streets to find her because as I am leaving this message, I am opening up my front door, setting her outside and locking the door behind her. So hurry, please."

No need to call Child Protective Services, I let Cora back in. But not before I had an actual stomp-up-and-down-while-flaili ng-my-arms-and-screaming-at-th e-top-of-my-lungs fit (feel free to judge me until you try it and realize just how therapeutic it is!).

Now why am I fessing up to yet another weakness as a mother. Simple. The day that I put up my arms in surrender and gave up on being an amazing mother was the day I became one. I shut the parenting books and the "How To" guides. I came to terms with the fact that I had royally screwed up from day one. Actually before day one. I mean I never played her Mozart while in utero and I couldn't keep down a single pre-natal vitamin, much less anything else for the first 6 months of my pregnancy. And when I could finally keep something in my stomach, I ate a fat, juicy hot dog (gasp) and enjoyed every last salty, nitrate filled morsel. And it just got worse after Cora was born. She was a formula baby after about eight weeks, she chewed on filthy, lead-filled car keys, and she ate solids before the magical age of four months. I could probably teach a class on how not to raise a child, yet here Cora is, still thriving 3 and a half years later.

And you would think I would have put all that trial and error to good use when parenting the second time around, but no. I didn't want our family to be unbalanced. So Claire is being

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