You’ve overhead the comments countless times. A young mom being told she has her “hands full” with all of her kids and that they “hope she’s not having any more”. Or the eyebrow raise full of passive aggressive judgment when the other moms in the playgroup hear you’re sending your child to the public school rather than getting on a waiting list for one of the elite schools. And, if you’ve heard, or received, the comments than you’ve also witnessed the subsequent upset mom who’s been offended.
As moms, we’re told we should all support each other no matter what, every way is the right way. Well, I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I do think that we should spend our time lifting each other up and loving others rather than not. But my bone to pick is not about what is said to us, it’s about how we receive what’s said to us. It might just be that you are the problem, not them.
This is not a call to “get over it”. It’s a call to confidence of who you are and acceptance of where you’re at. That you are a mom and that you are right now, at this moment, experiencing the blood, sweat and tears of motherhood.
If accepting where we’re at is step one, then owning our own actions is step two. Stop being offended. We are in control of what we’re offended by. People will talk regardless, it turns to offense based on how we receive it. People aren’t yelling out offenses, they’re yelling out what they think, and we choose to be offended by it. Right or wrong on their part, we get to decide our own response.
This should be empowering to us that are in the thick of it. That there is a better, more free way of living and we miss out on it by letting the chains of offense hold us down. No more. No more allowing others to dictate how we feel. There is enough to be weighed down by in this world, the things another person says about your parenting just isn’t one of them.
The era of blogging has worsened this and no, the irony is not lost on me. There are a million different soapboxes with a million different voices on each one, each shouting a different thing from a different perspective. While this is a beautiful thing in some ways, this also means there are a million chances a day for us to take offense by other women’s contrasting opinions.
You will be told you’re doing things wrong. And guess what? Sometimes you are doing things wrong. Sometimes we really may be what puts our kids in therapy later in life. And sometimes that’s not okay. And sometimes it is.
We don’t simply have to say, “We all try our best, every way is the right way”. Because that’s just not true either. Let’s welcome in some humility and let’s welcome the chance to stop taking ourselves so seriously. It’s obviously not helping anything. I’d argue that women today are more stressed, more anxious, more tired from running around in circles trying to keep up and prove themselves to silence the offenders.
Do I sometimes feel insecure around working moms because right now I feel that being a SAHM is “enough” for me? Yup, sure do.
Am I embarrassed it took me 18 months to put my daughter to bed without her being rocked to sleep? Certainly.
But here I am, I’m surviving and doing just fine. And the people that said told you so, well, they did tell me. Sometimes they turned out to be right. And sometimes they were bat crap crazy.
