What kind of mother would I have been?

This thought crosses my mind once in a while, for example, this weekend as I was lugging another dead plant out to the alley to dump its desiccated remains into the compost bin.

What kind of mother would I have been if I can’t even keep a plant alive?

Or on Sunday when I decided to let my indoor cat out into the garden to chase a few butterflies, and then got chatting to my neighbor and forgot about her. (She was fine, as it turns out.)

Would my kids have been the ones standing alone outside the school while I was sitting down to dinner looking around the table, thinking What’s missing here?

I realize that plants and cats don’t take quite the same level of mothering as children, but would I have been an attentive mother?

Maybe I’d have been the opposite – an overindulgent, permissive mother, whose children would create undisciplined riots everywhere they went. I mean, I spoil my cat rotten and she has absolute power over me. Would my children have pushed me around, too?

I know this is just self-pity talking, but I wonder, was I just not meant to be a mother? Do I not have the right stuff?

Too bad we’ll never get to find out.