Happy. Mother. You really can use both words in the same sentence.

To continue the conversation about “knowing your strengths”, I’d like to welcome my inspiration for this week’s theme: mom author, blogger, and cancer butt-kicker Jen Singer. I’ve known Jen since the very beginning of my writing career back in 2003, when she had just launched MommaSaid.net—one of the original mom blogs that’s going stronger than ever today. Jen’s career skyrocketed at an impressive pace—she penned (okay, she probably typed) five books over the last seven years, her most recent being the Stop Second-Guessing Yourself parenting series (there’s one for babies, one for toddlers and one for preschoolers, and they’re all witty, warm and encouraging—never judge-y or scary). Jen’s also a survivor: she wrote her way through lymphoma, and her cancer is now in remission. She’s writing about that experience in her memoir, “If Cancer is a Gift, Where Can I Return it: One Mom’s Year with the Worst Disease You Can Get.”

Here are Jen’s thoughts on happier motherhood.

Meagan: Have you always been a happy mom? Tell me a little bit about your journey.

Jen: Well, considering that the first sentence in my book, “Stop Second-Guessing Yourself – Baby’s First Year” is “I have a confession to make: I don’t really like babies all that much,” I guess not.

I had not one, but two colicky babies who cried upwards of ten hours a day for a total of seven months, which is as long as two college semesters, minus the keg parties or any measurable fun. So you can see why it was hard for me to fall in love with motherhood, even though I truly loved my babies. My kids’ first years were nothing like the baby lotion commercials had promised, and it made me feel like a failure.

Add to that the pressure to be the perfect mom that our generation has put upon ourselves, and, well, I had a rough go of it for a while. But once I learned to stop trying to get the Mother of the Year award and simply enjoyed life with my kids, it got easier – and I got happier.

Meagan: When you first had kids, did you have an image in your head of the “kind of mom” you’d be, or what motherhood would be like? Did it match your reality?

Jen: I knew that I wanted to be like my mom, who was a class mom and soccer coach – just like I am now. But I also wanted to be like my mother-in-law, who told me she loves really little kids because “they need you.” But I don’t want to be needed so much that I have to pull the car over every twenty feet and prop up the baby’s head so he doesn’t cut off his own air supply. Rather, I want to be the mom who teaches 17 kids how to take a goal kick or the one who helps set up the lemonade stand at the end of the driveway.

My mother always said she prefers kids once they hit age 4, and I guess I do, too. Still, I entertained a baby sitting in my pew at church this week just the same. Yet, I was thrilled when I wasn’t the one who had to go unfussify him in the middle of mass. Know your strengths.

Meagan: I love the advice to “know your strengths”, and it’s something I’ve really emphasized in my book The Happiest Mom. The fact is, we can’t all be good at everything. I wonder if you can talk a little about how doing what we’re good at allows us to move over a bit and make room for the moms who are good at other stuff. For example, I’m your opposite in that I’d love nothing more than to sit and rock a newborn baby all day, but coach a team of 4-year-olds? No thanks! But I think that makes us stronger as a collective, don’t you?

Jen: The bar for motherhood has been raised so impossibly high, you will kill yourself trying to reach it. And that isn’t good for you or your kids. The moment I gave up the idea that I should be the Best Mommy Ever! to my babies and toddlers and just tried to be a good mom was the moment I did my entire family the biggest favor ever. I love teaching a car-full of kids the words to “Hungry Heart,” but I can do without making teachable moments out of every trip to the shampoo aisle at Target. Neither is better and neither is wrong. Don’t force a round peg into Mommy and Me class.

Meagan: When you look around, is there something you consistently see other moms doing that gets in the way of their happiness?

Yes, they put themselves dead last and then they act like martyrs for doing it. Just because you’re a mother, it doesn’t mean you’re no longer a person. Someone said that a happy mom makes a good mom, and I believe that…to a point. (If it makes you happy to drink all day, that’s a different issue.)

But we are raising our kids to leave us. If your entire existence is centered around your kid’s contentment, and you’re struggling to make their lives go as smoothly as possible, you are hurting two people – your child and you. Life is a roller coaster, not a monorail. You need to teach your child to weather the ups and downs. And you need to keep your soul and your being intact along the way, because one day, your kids will be gone, and then you’ll wonder who you are.

Meagan I’m always telling people “it’s not my job to make my kids happy–it’s my job to give them the tools they need to make themselves happy.” Something tells me you’d agree. What do you think, on the flip side, about this cultural expectation that kids will “make” us happy? Don’t you think that’s a pretty tall order for such short people?

Jen: I talked to Newsweek about this very issue a few years back. I said that if you admit that kids aren’t making you happy every waking moment, it’s blasphemy among today’s parents. But parenting is a relationship. Sometimes you like your kids more than other times, but you always love them. And if you do your job right, they feel the same way about you. But you should never put the onus on anyone to make you happy and vice versa. There will be great days, days when you can’t imagine life without your kids and everything is sweetness and light like a commercial for Disney World. And then there are days you’re screaming at your kids (and vice versa), and you want to hide in a book, the gym or a glass of wine. The key is understanding that this is normal. Also, that the in between days – the average of motherhood – is what parenting is all about.

Meagan: What do you think is the biggest factor to your happiness as a mom?

Jen: I wrote about this in “You’re a Good Mom (and Your Kids Aren’t So Bad Either’): I believe that there’s a sweet spot between Super Mom and Slacker Mom where you can raise perfectly good kids and be happy. Aim for that place and you’ll be happy too.

Meagan: Who do you look to–or have you looked to in the past–as your happy mother role models?

Jen: When I had my driver’s permit, my mom made up a series of driving tests designed to get me ready not only for the driver’s test, but for going off into the world without her. I had to parallel park in a busy downtown, sit in traffic on the highway and fill up my gas tank. My final test was to drive on a harrowing clover leaf during New York City rush hour on a Friday night. Once I passed that, I was ready.

If that isn’t a metaphor for good mothering, I don’t know what is. And that makes me happy.

Thank you, Jen!

Please check back next Wednesday for my next Happy Mom Interview. I’ll be featuring Laura Vanderkam, author of “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think“.

Readers, please continue the conversation: what are your mom strengths? What have you learned you could live without (or can’t seem to master no matter how hard you try)?

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