On Being a Good Mother in May

By mid-May, the calendar stops being helpful.

It becomes more like evidence. A record of every time I said, “Yes, that should be fine,” without fully understanding what future me would be dealing with.

Every square is filled. Not in a chaotic way, but in that very organized, color-coded way that gives the illusion of control.

Dance rehearsals, competitions, conventions, and games that require arrival forty-five minutes early for reasons no one can fully explain. Art shows and spring music concerts where the third- through fifth-grade strings section is uniformly, confidently off key, there are approximately eighteen quadrillion solos, and you are somehow emotionally invested in locating the three notes that might be your child’s. Field days, which are less about fields and more about locating your child in a sea of identical t-shirts.

“Quick” end-of-school celebrations that require you to bring something that looks homemade but cannot, under any circumstances, actually be homemade at 9:30 the night before. Teacher appreciation weeks that unfold less like a week and more like a coordinated campaign, complete with assigned days, themes, and the quiet understanding that opting out is technically allowed but not entirely neutral.

Spirit days that are announced just late enough to cause a problem. Half-days that function as full logistical events. End-of-year awards that may or may not matter, but absolutely require attendance. Sign-up sheets that fill in the ten minutes you spend thinking about whether you have time to think about it.

And, inexplicably, a first-grade assignment that involves building a recycle bot, as though we are all quietly expected to run small engineering firms out of our kitchens.

The weekends go first.

At some point, they stop being weekends and start being logistics puzzles. Saturday morning: one kid here, one kid there, one event that overlaps just enough with another to make you question your entire system. Sunday used to be a reset. Now it’s just Saturday with slightly lower expectations and a growing sense of dread about Monday.

And the weekdays, somehow, are worse.

Because they pretend to be normal. School drop-off, work, pick-up. Except layered into that are the end-of-year everything. And you go. Of course, you go.

Because this is the part where you’re supposed to show up.

Not just physically. Competently. Thoughtfully. With the right snack, the signed form, the correct shirt for whatever themed day someone definitely mentioned, and you definitely half-registered while doing something else.

This is what people mean when they say “Maycember,” which is cute but also misleading. December at least has a plot. May is just an accumulation. There is no grand finale, just a slow taper into June and the vague sense that you survived something.

And running quietly underneath all of it is the expectation that you will do this well. Not perfectly, exactly. But well enough that no one—especially you—questions it.

This is usually the point at which I think of Mary Oliver and her poem “Wild Geese.”

“You do not have to be good.”

It’s one of those lines that people quote so often that it risks losing its edge. But in May, it feels less like a nice idea and more like a direct contradiction of everything the month requires.

Because “good,” in May, is not a personality trait. It’s a performance. Good means you remembered. Good means you anticipated. Good means you didn’t have to scramble, or if you did, no one noticed.

And the thing is: no one is actually keeping score. Or at least, no one else is.

We are the ones doing the accounting. Mentally tallying what we got right, what we almost forgot, and what we’re going to fix tomorrow. There’s always a quiet sense that if we could just be slightly more organized, slightly more on top of things, this would all feel manageable.

It never does. It just becomes normal. There’s a line later in the poem:

“You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

Which feels, at minimum, relevant to anyone who has stayed up too late trying to make up for something small that did not go as planned. The form that was late. The snack that was not ideal. The moment where you realized—too late—that it was “wear green day.”

None of it matters as much as it feels. And yet, in the moment, it feels like everything.

What Mary Oliver offers instead is not a better system, or a more efficient way to manage May, but a quiet refusal of the premise.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Which, in this context, might look less like anything poetic and more like very small, slightly rebellious decisions.

Buying the cupcakes. Skipping the optional thing. Sitting in your car for five extra minutes after drop-off because it is the only quiet time you will get all day. Letting something be good enough without circling back to improve it.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth about Maycember: There is no version of this where you win. There is only a version where you make it through without completely exhausting yourself trying to prove that you are doing it “right.”

“Meanwhile the world goes on.”

The missed email does not stop it. The imperfect contribution does not alter its course.
The fact that you are, at any given moment, slightly behind does not register at all.

“The wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.”

They are not optimizing their route. They are not checking a list. They are not wondering if they are doing enough. They are just going. And maybe that’s the only useful takeaway for May. Not that you should do less, exactly. Or care less.

Just that you do not have to be good at all of it, you just have to keep moving.