Won by a landslide

Sitting here at the end of my summer session, I am a teacher, I have had some time to reflect on my mother.  I have written before that she was not the best mother.  My mother had internal struggles that led to her mothering skills being a tad bit compromised.  Where I work, there are some strange examples of mothers all of which were affected by something in their lives that made them bad mothers.  As a matter of fact, some were horrible mothers.  That is when I had a Eureka moment.  I have always compared my mother to good mothers.  When I did, she did not even compare.  She was a bad mother.  When I compared her to bad mothers, she won by a landslide.  If you are comparing apples to apples, a bad apple is really bad.  An apple doesn't stand a chance being compared to oranges.  My mother should have never been compared to women who weren't abused, weren't abandoned and weren't neglected.  My mother often said that she was a poor "throwed away" child.  If you compare her to Claire Huxtable, she was a miserable failure.  When I compared her to the woman who was sexually abused who then molested her children, abandoned her children and suffocated them in hot ovens, my mother won, like I said, by a landslide.  Now, I know what the old folks always told me.  She did the best she could.  She wasn't an apple, she was an orange and if compared to oranges, she did pretty darn good.