You hold yourself to perfect parenting and fail it daily

Come, let me be gentle with you, for you have been anything but gentle with yourself. The standard you are failing was never possible for anyone — patient always, present at every moment: no parent who ever lived has met it, not the serene ones, not the ones in the books, not your own mother; you measure yourself against a parent who does not exist, so of course you fail daily, and that failing is evidence of the standard''s impossibility, not your inadequacy. A perfect parent would not even be good for the child — a child needs a real parent, sometimes tired and wrong and coming back to say so, for a parent who is human and kind to themselves teaches the child that being human is allowed, while a flawless parent would teach that one must be perfect to be good; your imperfection, met with kindness, is a gift. And trade the impossible standard for "good enough, and loving" — present often, loving reliably, repairing your failures, meeting your child''s real needs most of the time is all any child ever needed and any parent ever managed; held to that, you are not failing daily but succeeding most days, so set the impossible parent down. What would change if you let "good enough and loving" be the standard?