Parenting Failures: You’re Not Alone (And Certainly Not the Worst)

Clémence and Manon are respectively mothers of two young children, of different ages, but not so far apart.

And like all parents on Earth, they experienced moments of absolute shame, the kind we tell about by hiding a little, because damn it, it’s the LOSE Anyway.

Here they give you their results, because no one is perfect, especially when lack of sleep forces you to do absolutely everything.

No judgement, we all go through it more or less!

Clémence’s worst parenting failures:

Clémence has a daughter who is almost 14 months old (just over a year, for those who can’t count the months) and has had time to do some messy experiments with her little girl, some harmless and some downright disturbing:

• The worst failure? I want to try free bathing with my three month old baby. Have her lie on the bottom of the bathtub with the water up to her ears and watch her immediately turn her head to the side and drink from the cup. I’ll then give you the call to SAMU and the panic attack after Googling “dry drowning” (it’s a myth, don’t stress if it ever happens to you).
• Buying expensive slippers to learn to walk, with the flexible sole attached to a kind of cutely patterned sock, and realizing once you get home that they don’t stay on your feet for more than thirty seconds.
• Cut his nails and… with them a piece of skin. These things are too small, it’s not possible! Since then he has been her father who continues to do it while I act as a clown to distract her.
• Remove a booger dangling from her nose, insist a little because this earth is still attached and… make my daughter’s nose bleed.
• Airing out her room on a summer night and discovering her the next day with about twenty gigantic bites on her face and hands. We have since installed mosquito nets on the windows.

Manon’s Worst Parenting Failures:

Manon has a four-year-old daughter (and a half, let’s underline half), and has experienced a series of small parental shames, more or less presumed. Non-exhaustive list, which unfortunately risks continuing to grow over the years:

• Fill your morning bottle with the wine bottle placed on the kitchen worktop, instead of the bottled water provided for this purpose
• Always fill the same bottle (but not on the same day, otherwise it’s no fun) with coffee, instead of milk
• Convinced that her father should have come to pick her up from nursery and realizing that it wasn’t the right day, after receiving a phone call from the director informing that the institute would close with the little girl inside
• Mistaking my daughter for someone else at the park because they were dressed alike and firmly told her to get her ass home, before being glared at by the child’s mother
• Sending the little girl to school wearing Frozen pajamas one morning when I was awake and in a hurry
• Forgetting the pediatrician’s appointment for the booster vaccine three times in a row
• Four and a half years later, I still don’t know how to fold or unfold this damn stroller
• Having to listen to nursery rhymes on YouTube to find out what my daughter is singing, because I know nothing about children’s music
• Buys her first expensive walking shoes, puts her in the stroller for a walk around the neighborhood, comes home noticing she only has one shoe left on her feet
• Dressing her up like a doll for a friend’s wedding, gambling everything on her outfit and realizing she has a stomach virus that made her diaper spill over her pale pink dress (and mine by the way), right in the middle of it . ceremony, in complete tranquility.
• Pick up the piece of cucumber that fell to the ground, bet everything on the “5 second rule” and give it back to the child, seeing at the last moment all the cat hairs stuck to it, without being able to stop his chubby little hand from grabbing it and swallowing it at breakneck speed.

We can’t wait to read your failures! No one will judge you, I promise!

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