Glinda the Good Witch: Our Children are Proud of Us

A few days ago, I read something about Michelle Williams and her seven-year-old daughter Matilda, and it really struck a chord.

First, let me say that I adore Michelle Williams, not even as an actress so much as a person. She is my single-mom role model. She always seemed like a good mom to me, staying strong after her daughter's father (the late, great, Heath Ledger) overdosed on prescription pills, staying grounded, opting for Brooklyn over Hollywood, always looking pretty and young and edgy but never trashy, balancing her career with being a mother, being very choosy about who she dates, that kind of thing. But you never really understand something until you're going through it yourself, so I could not truly appreciate Michelle's single-mom awesomeness until about a year ago, when I became one. 

Anyway, apparently Matilda is so proud of the fact that her mother played the character Glinda the Good Witch in the movie Oz, the Great and Powerful, that she has a Glinda t-shirt, wants to be Glinda for Halloween, and regularly goes up to children at the playground and brags about her mom's role. Michelle recently told David Denby of The New Yorker that:

“She’s starting to understand more and more. She knows a lot about Glinda the Good Witch, a lot about who that is, what that was,” ...

“She would go up to people in the park and say, ‘My mommy is Glinda the Good Witch in Oz. There’s two bad ones and only one good one and that’s my mom,’” says Williams.

I love that Matilda is so insanely proud that her mother played the good witch. And I love that Michelle is so happy that her daughter is proud of her, that she is choosing to talk about it with a journalist. That's one of the things that no one ever told me about being a mom: if you give your children your heart, not only will they give you unconditional love, but they will also be fiercely proud of the fact that you are their mother. I read an article recently that discussed the fact that while we may sometimes feel like we are failing as mothers because we aren't doing everything perfectly, our young children don't look at it that way at all. They only have one mother, and it's us, and they are proud that we are their mothers, because they know that we love them. And they love us in return. I can tell you hands-down that there is no better feeling in the world than the joy I feel when I hear my daughter proudly tell the other children at school, "That's my mommy!"

It makes me feel like I must be doing something right. And I'm not even Glinda the Good Witch.




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