Glass half full?
It seems every parenting magazine and blog around speaks to that doozy of an emotion — shameful, hopeless, and inconsequential — that many moms feel a lot of the time: "mother envy." Shameful in that we know we shouldn't be bothered by it; hopeless in that there is nothing we can do about it; inconsequential in that it should have no place in our otherwise busy, bountiful, and, yes, beautiful lives. And yet it still serves to plague us like the true epidemic it is.
If you are one of the few not familiar with this feeling let me give you a few examples:
- There's the mom who has two young children but still manages to create beautiful art and inspire her own children to do the same
- There's the mom who keeps her house spotless and her kids dressed beautifully all the things you want your children to be dressed in
- There's the mom who has perfectly balanced and varied lunches for her child every day packed divinely with love notes, no less... every day
- There's the mom whose kids have virtually no screen time and can occupy themselves brilliantly while she gets things done around the house
- There's the mom who hosts the private school coffee mornings for parents whose house looks right out of Dwell or Architectural Living. Do kids really even live here?
- And then, of course, the holy grail for those of us who have chosen to stay at home with their kids, the mom who has an amazing career and still manages to get to all the school events with happy kids in tow.
Get the drift? I mean we all suffer from envy in some way or another. I even posted about this recently in my post "Reflections on a full life." But for some reason we suffer through this particular soul-crusher daily, during school pick-ups, run-ins at the local coffee shop, other mothers blog postings, no less. I once had a dear friend even mention that she couldn't relate to some of my posts about my kids eating habits. (Did part of me actually get a little excited that I might be one of those moms that another mom might actually envy? Wow!) But seriously, it actually made me feel a bit bad that perhaps I had come across too self-righteous. After all, isn't what we all really want more of a sign of solidarity, rather than another indication of exclusion?
I recently went to the reading of one of my friends, who has recently published her first book: Green Mama: What Parents Need to Know to Give Their Children a Healthy Start and a Greener Future. After a brief discussion about how the book came into being after years of environmental activism and the joys and realities of parenthood (which then gave birth to her blog The Green Mama), the author, Manda Aufochs Gillespie, opened the floor for questions and discussion. One of the refrains heard most often that evening was how Manda presents her material both in book and blog with such a nonjudgmental tone, especially for an activist (although one could easily say, "especially for a mother" as well). This is no small feat. After all, we live in a world now where we sit in judgment of even ourselves if our kids run the water too long or eat cereal with any artificial colors or too much sugar (God-forbid high fructose corn syrup!). And what Manda said in response was simple and profound. She said, in essence, that there is no point in knocking people over the head with the rights and wrongs of things. The most important thing is for us to do our best to model good practices for our family and others. Plain and simple. As she talked about this, I recalled the moments where this modeling changed the way I did things in small yet significant ways. How seeing a good friend of mine pull tattered and mismatched napkins from a bin and lay them out for a potluck dinner caused me to go home that night and pull out all the cloth napkins I had bought in India and put them in a basket by the table, never to use paper napkins or paper towels as a daily practice again, with the exception the odd birthday party or a home-cooked dinner that involved whole fish or, worse yet, sardines (I learned this the hard way after making a whole load of laundry smell like fish after throwing in the cloth napkins after said dinner). Or how, after seeing another friend storing lentils and beans in jars in her open cupboard caused me to pull out all those saved applesauce jars and start storing all my beans, lentils, grains, nuts, dried fruits in them as opposed to using more ziplocs or buying more expensive containers from The Container Store. It takes a village to teach these things... little by little.
But perhaps I digress. What I meant to say through that lengthy passage was that even in those moments where you think you're getting one-upped by the mom next door, there is always a moment for reflection and insight... when our feelings of inadequacy can change, in an instant, to gratitude for lessons learned. Just tonight I read another article in the New York Times mobile edition entitled Our 'Mommy' Problem, by Heather Havrilesky. And I just have to post this section, which is a little lengthy, but stay with it:
“We know far too much about other people’s lives these days, and the more we know, the clearer it becomes that we are doomed to lag behind the pack in this increasingly high-stakes game.
Sure, it’s possible to be inspired by the great dinner ideas on Goop or the excellent examples set by other parents online. Personally, though, I don’t want to read about amazing kid-friendly boutique hotels with treehouse cabins in Sweden. I don’t want to know about the most delicious cherry pie some super-relaxed stay-at-home dad made with his towheaded toddler. I am not interested in hearing theories on what gave your 5-year-old such a premature grasp of quadratic equations, or about the countless benefits of living in Berlin for your now-German-speaking, bicycle-riding, train-hopping spawn. There’s too much pressure, on parents in general and mothers in particular, to keep our kids away from corn syrup and bullies and industrially farmed beef while introducing them to chapter books and charcoal drawings and parasailing.
Maybe it’s not ideal for a kid to unlock her front door and watch “Gilligan’s Island” every afternoon, as I once did, but lately we’ve swung so far in the opposite direction that it’s hard to understand how two mortal parents (let alone one!) are supposed to keep up. I like violins and knitted tea cozies and themed birthday parties as much as the next Earthling. But before I get to that stuff, I need to clear a path through this dirty laundry so I can get to the dishwasher. I’m hesitant to throw myself into any high-maintenance child-related activity too enthusiastically lest I doom myself to becoming a specialist in an unpaid field that might cut into the time I spend on things like, I don’t know, making a living? Staying in shape? Seeing my friends occasionally?
The current culture demands that every mother be all in, all the time.”
Can you relate? I imagine, yes. We all can. We don't just envy other mothers, we envy a whole culture of blog posts, diy projects, Pinterest pages, you name it that seem to survive and even thrive on the mere chance that we feel just inadequate enough to buy into it all. Don't get me wrong, I just spent 15 minutes tonight going through a blog post on 37 Clever Ways to Organize your Entire Life with IKEA (go ahead, I know you want to click on it); undeniably, the chase never ends. But after reading "Our 'Mommy' Problem," it is clear that most of us often forget our lives before we were moms... how we were once simply daughters, students, companions, friends, lovers, academics, professionals, artists, and the list goes on. Many of us still are many of those things, informing the people we are and the parents we continue to be. So instead of envying everyone else, let's give ourselves a break and celebrate (or even just remember) the parts within ourselves that are worth envying. It may seem trite, but hey, it's a hell of a concept.
