By Morgan of Surviving Artfully
Recently, a friend confessed a deep, dark secret to me. We were talking about what time our kids woke up. Her three-year-old was a mercilessly early riser, usually up and at ‘em by 6:30 every morning, while her one-year-old had just reached that glorious milestone of sleeping in until almost 8:00. Katherine lowered her voice. “I put the Kindle in Carly’s bed and let her watch shows on Netflix for, like, an hour while I sleep in with Megan every morning.” She grimaced. “I know, I’m a horrible mom.”
I could have consoled my friend with a shameful confession of my own: my two-year-old has watched Frozen so many times, I have now fully developed an entire alternate version in my head. (If you must know, it involves Ana and Elsa murdering Hans, running away to a Disneyfied version of Mexico, and becoming adorable lady-bandits.) Instead, I mumbled something vague and changed the subject.
Though I didn’t really want to admit it, I understood where she was coming from. As modern mothers, we are inundated daily with “helpful” tidbits about how to raise our children. Our inboxes are flooded with militantly cheerful newsletters detailing the beatific bonding scenes that should be playing out in our homes. Pinterest is saturated with enrichment activities brought to you by perfectly crunchy über-mommies who preschool-homeschool and don’t own a TV. The internet makes it so damn easy to feel inadequate.
Of course, her “horrible mom” statement was hyperbole, but it had a purpose. She was really saying, “Don’t judge me for this, because I am already beating myself up about it.”
Katherine is far from a horrible mother. I see her deep well of patience with her two children; I watch her work hard to instill manners and kindness in both of them. Her kids are sweet, smart girls who clearly love their mother. An actual horrible mother wouldn’t keep one child safely occupied so she could snuggle with her baby; she would let the TV babysit both kids all day while she cooked meth in the basement. Yet after her mommy confessional, I realized I heard a similar refrain from my parent-friends all the time: this ceaseless litany of apologies for what we perceive as parental shortcomings.
My sister-in-law apologized profusely because the fruit snacks she’d brought on an outing contained high fructose corn syrup. Another friend was embarrassed to admit that he bought his son the occasional Happy Meal. And I constantly catch myself punctuating some child-related anecdote with an eye-roll and a sarcastic, “I know, I’m gunning for Mommy of the Year.”
Why do otherwise great, nurturing mothers (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, fathers) feel the need to self-flagellate when we believe we’re breaking one of the ever-changing rules of modern parenting? Part of the reason is comparison.
Our lives – and by default, our parenting skills – are on display and up for criticism to an unprecedented degree. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, blogs – they’re all just billboards to advertise what great parents we are, and no one wants to air their dirty laundry. We cherry-pick, embellish, exaggerate, and sometimes outright invent in order to hide the messy, imperfect truths about raising kids, yet it’s easy to forget that everyone else is doing the same thing. We fall into the trap of thinking that other parents have their shit together more than we do, or that maybe they’re just naturally better at this whole parenting game.
We also judge ourselves harshly as a defense mechanism – maybe if we say we’re awful parents, other people won’t point it out. Partly to blame is the whole technology-enabled culture of nitpicking at other people’s lives. We now have horrible new phrases – mommy wars, mommy shaming, competitive parenting – that have just entered the common parlance within the last decade, coinciding with the explosion of social media and smartphones. As with most forms of nastiness, we tend to criticize in others the very things that we dislike most about ourselves.
Perhaps the key to stopping the mommy shaming trend isn’t to shame the shamers – maybe it really does start with us. What would happen if we refused to be embarrassed about occasionally letting our kids wear their pajamas out in public? What if our Facebook statuses sometimes admitted that our offspring had acted like little demon shits that day, and we hadn’t handled it well?
Maybe if we all worked at being more forgiving of ourselves, maybe if we all admitted that this parenting thing is really fucking hard and no one actually has it all figured out, maybe then we wouldn’t find it quite so easy to criticize and judge another parent — and ourselves.
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About Morgan
Morgan has been writing for public consumption since 2007, and her work most recently appeared in Blue Ridge Country magazine. She blogs about crafty parenting at Surviving Artfully, and you can follow her snarkiness on Twitter @morganh_writes.