We're overwhelmed.

I watched yesterday's Oprah last night while I was trying to fall asleep. Did you see it? It was terrible. It made me physically ill, actually. It focused on a woman named Brenda Slaby from Ohio. In August 2007, on the first day of school, Slaby accidentally left her 2-year-old little girl in her car in the parking lot of the middle school where she was the vice principal. For seven hours. Her daughter Cecelia died that day, strapped in her carseat in 100-degree weather.

The horror.

The episode talked about how mothers need to slow down. It also featured several mothers, weeping and confessing how overwhelmed they are, and how easy it would be to make a tragic mistake like Slaby's with irreparable consequences. Slaby has become a controversial figure in her hometown, because before the accident occurred, she had been singled out for leaving the baby asleep in the car for minutes when she went inside to pick her older daughter up from daycare. She told Oprah that she felt the two acts were different, because when she ran in to pick up her older daughter she was aware, but when she left Cecelia in the car that day in August 2007, she had no conscious idea that she was doing it.

It would be easy to judge a woman who essentially killed her own daughter when she had shown somewhat questionable judgment in the past. Except I have done the same thing. I admit that I have run a few yards to pick up something or someone, leaving a running car with a baby inside. It's not something I have made a practice of and I certainly pick and choose when I have felt comfortable doing it, but I have done it. In fact, I recently went to a delivery service for dry cleaning because I could not find a place where I felt comfortable grabbing my laundry with the baby in the car right outside (literally within five steps) and I could not carry the dry cleaning and the baby safely at the same time. I can understand her urge to do that.

I can also understand that breaking her routine -- she was not the parent that usually dropped the baby off at daycare -- could confuse Slaby. That has happened to me. I do not have a full time job like she did at the time, and still in the mornings I am a crazed lunatic getting my children ready for school, trying to remember who needs a lunch and who needs a snack, who needs a swimsuit and who needs homework signed. It's a mad rush no matter what, but on the rare morning we change the routine, my brain definitely fights against me. I could easily make a mistake.

I cannot judge that mother and I am horrified at what happened to her family. But the real impact of the episode for me was the sound of the other mothers' voices in the tapes Oprah played. Those women were exhausted. They were desperate. They were, as they said over and over again, overwhelmed.

We're overwhelmed.

We are supposed to be perfect mothers with perfect children. We're supposed to be thin, but not too thin -- then we would have a problem. Even better is to be athletic, because that equals thin but strong. We're supposed to look the other way when our husbands read Playboy or watch the golf tournament more closely than they do they children. We're supposed to work for pay, have fulfilling careers that we excel at and the stellar resumes to show for it, and we are also supposed to make it to every PTA meeting on time, but we're not supposed to let our children suffer from our absences. We're supposed to actually bake the treats for the bake sale -- and they have to be the most delicious treats on the table, individually wrapped in colored cellophane and seasonal ribbon. We're supposed to make our children's birthday invitations with a stamping kit, but not by ourselves -- we have to let the children help because then we are BONDING over it and empowering them at the same time. We're not supposed to turn on the TV when they are home, we are supposed to engage them in crafts and activities and play on the floor with them, but we are also expected to feed them organic, nutritionally sound meals free of HFCS and BPA and trans fats and sugar -- and we need to have a clean house by bedtime.

And we're supposed to do this in a feminist-approved manner. We're supposed to make our husbands do their equal part. And if they don't, it's because we did something wrong. And if our kids act up at a restaurant or on an airplane, well, obviously, we're just bad mothers. If our child is afraid of something, we damaged him. If he acts up at school, we need to fix him so he is appropriate. If he is sad, we've traumatized him. We're not supposed to yell, but we're supposed to be effective disciplinarians. And in our parents' day, children certainly did NOT act like this, so what the hell is wrong with us?

We're overwhelmed. Is it any wonder?

What is more amazing is that stories like Brenda Slaby's are not more common. That we don't make more mistakes that have grave consequences. That we aren't all rocking in the fetal position in a dark corner somewhere. We're overwhelmed, and we need -- we must -- acknowledge it and say that it's not okay. We need help. We need support. We cannot do this all by ourselves. And that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with us, or that we are weak, or that we are bad mothers. We're good mothers, doing the best we can, and we are overwhelmed.

And I think the first step is extending grace: extending grace to ourselves, to our own mothers, to our friends, and to strangers.

But that's a whole other Oprah show, as I like to say. And another post.