My Tiny Copycat

Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it. Yet.

I think about new beginnings every single day. Because every single day, I do something as a mom that I regret.

Sometimes it’s a little thing: too much screen time, not enough hand washing, letting my one-year-old rummage the kitchen cupboards because he’s too cute to stop. Sometimes it’s something bigger: not intervening quickly enough before one child hurts another, losing my temper, yelling. Almost every night I take the regret to bed with me, a grim and anxious haunt for the wee hours of the morning when I’m awake with my toddler and caving, bleary-eyed, to his incessant requests for cartoons and crunchy snacks.

Lately my one-year-old, Ben, has been going through a midnight-and-early-waking phase. Some nights he’s upright in his crib at one A.M., screaming and inconsolable unless I’m holding him in the rocking chair, struggling to keep myself awake as I try to breathe sleep into his resistant chubby limbs. Some nights he sleeps reasonably well for several hours and then sounds the alarm at four A.M., completely unwilling—no matter what I do—to return to his crib and succumb to anything so boring as slumber. On those mornings I take him down to our cold basement so he doesn’t wake the rest of the house, and do exactly what all the child sleep experts recommend not to do: turn on the TV.

I lug him down to the basement, one hand gripping the stair rail as my semi-conscious feet find their way, the other clutching my self-satisfied toddler already munching on pretzels. On the couch, I make a valiant effort to lie flat under an afghan while Ben hoots and bounces, and I beg him to sit still for at least five minutes of a Winnie-the-Pooh movie. Rarely does it work. In moments he’s up again, toddling around the chilly tile floor in a sleep sack that’s growing too tight. He points at the TV, hooting again, and I change the screen to Curious George or Bluey or Ms. Rachel. Nothing keeps him down for long. He wants me up, chipper, engaged, ready to play with him, not hiding my aching head under a sofa pillow studded with crumbs from animal crackers.

This is typical behavior for Ben: a body in motion that cannot be at rest. Even when he’s sick, when your average child is supposed to recline in bed and lick weakly at a Pedialyte popsicle, Ben prefers to trek through the house to flush the toilet a dozen times. He wants to “help” with laundry, to “sweep” the floor, but when I interfere with his machinations, he howls. Wrathfully, he pulls clean silverware out of the dishwasher and crashes it into a drawer. I suggest a board book and he shrieks, “noooooooo!”

“Why can’t you just chill out?” I wail, not as metaphorically as you might think. “Why can’t you rest? Why can’t you let Mommy rest?”

He blinks at me, round-eyed and round-cheeked, rosy with a low-grade fever and fueled only by small crackers and infantile rage. “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he shouts again, and gives me a kiss on the cheek before marching away to pound on the refrigerator so that I will open it and he can peer inside and whine fruitlessly for a snack that doesn’t exist.

Then, a few nights ago, everything became clear at dinnertime. I was feeding my kids spaghetti and meatballs, a winner of a dinner that somehow manages to please both my children. (Not at the same time, of course: my four-year-old, Andy, eats the meatballs, while Ben inhales the spaghetti. There’s something terribly Jack Sprattish about it all.) I sat down for a moment in between cutting up meatballs and fetching “shakey cheese” to drink a mug of tea, and Ben immediately spied it. He lifted up his voice in plaintive demand, but I said no. He shrieked. I refused again. And then, as I turned away for one more kitchen errand, he managed to snag the handle of the mug that I thought was out of reach and tipped it to cover his whole face, noisily smacking the last dregs of Sleepytime Sinus Soother.

That was when it clicked for me, Ben wants to do everything I do: dishes, laundry, drinking hot tea. He won’t sit down in front of Daniel Tiger because I don’t sit down in front of Daniel Tiger. I plunk the kids down on the couch for a few minutes of quiet and then I’m off to make an important phone call or move the clothes from the washer to the dryer or put groceries away. I’m up, wandering, often talking in less-than-pleasant tones and shouting the word “no.” And so is Ben. Every step I take, every mistake I make—my one-year-old is watching me.

I've been told since the beginning of my parenting journey that kids need consistency. But perhaps they also need the flexibility and grace to begin again, to see me try again. They need to know that their mom messes up because she’s a human being, and that they will, inevitably, do the same. If they see me forgive myself, maybe they’ll begin the journey toward doing that, too.

Once upon a time, the knowledge that my toddler is mimicking me in both good and bad ways might have sent me into a spiral. It still might, if I forget to take my anxiety meds. But as this new year starts fresh I am choosing to do the same. There is room for trying new things in 2025—green vegetables, less TV, shedding some of the perpetual mom guilt, following the worst moments with a heartfelt apology.

“Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it,” L. M. Montgomery wrote in Anne of Green Gables. “No mistakes in it yet,” Miss Stacy amends in the 1985 Kevin Sullivan adaptation of the novel. As I write this, I’ve made no mistakes yet in the new year, but I know they’ll be as plentiful as the cracker crumbs under my couch. But if I’m going to teach my children how to unload the dishwasher and drink tea and sit still for just one episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, I’ll have to also teach them to take a deep breath, to start over, to try again. To give their past self grace so they can wake up (at a reasonable hour, please) ready to greet a fresh day.