An Argument for Comparison
It's only the "thief of joy" if you let it be.
Even before I had kids, I had this theory about the Mommy Wars: that the battles fought were proactively defensive, rather than offensive, in nature.
Of course, I didn’t know then how deep the trenches had been dug or how laden with mines the No Man’s Land between, for instance, exclusively breastfeeding or exclusively formula feeding. (I use that example because we combo fed, and that’s how I sometimes felt about not having both feet in either camp.) And I didn’t realize on how many fronts the war is waged.
Since Robbie was born, I’ve come to understand that the Mommy Wars are really a civil war. We should all be on the same side working towards a common goal but, for reasons I am not well-researched enough to explore here now - though I suspect they have to do with patriarchy and sexism - we feel like others’ decisions, if they differ from ours, are an assault on the ones we’ve made.
There are just so many options these days when it comes to parenting and so few supports that it’s easy to feel like we’re not making the right choice. Or at least that there might be a better choice, even if ours technically works; through social media we can see the results of the paths that other parents have gone down. Their successes - in all their posed, styled, and filtered glory - pop up on our screens every time we collapse on the couch to take a break from whatever’s challenging us.
The thing is, I don’t think that the solution is ignoring how other people choose to parent. I didn’t know how to articulate why until I read a recent Substack post from Sara Petersen titled “Maybe I’m Just Jealous.” In it, she quotes Kelsey McKinney in You Didn’t Hear This From Me:
“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people,” Socrates or Eleanor Roosevelt or whoever said. But the ancient Greeks also said that all philosophical commandments can be reduced to a simple goal: “Know yourself.” And what I said, about myself at least, is that gossip isn’t a tool so much as it is a reflection. The way we gossip, who we gossip about, and how we respond to these stories show us the person we are. They help us understand where we fit in the greater scheme of trying to be a person in the world. The truth we are searching so desperately for is self-knowledge.
Petersen goes on to write, “Thinking about the ways in which other people live is one of the best ways I know of making meaning. Not only of my own personhood, but of the seas in which I’m swimming.”
While I don’t condone judging other parents for their choices, I do think that exploring them holds up a mirror to our own and forces us to justify them - not to anyone else, but to ourselves. It demands that we ask why we’re doing something and if that thing is working. Maybe it’s not working for us and we can change something. Maybe it’s not working for us but we don’t have other options. Along those lines, it also requires that we acknowledge our differences when we compare our decisions: she can be a stay-at-home-mom, for example, because they come from family money or because they live in somewhere with a very low cost of living; you can’t because you don’t.
Examining that, as McKinney and Petersen write, is a way of making sense of who we are and how we fit into the systems in which we operate. It helps us feel more secure in our parenting. And, hopefully, it gives us the confidence not to fight in the Mommy Wars as a way of defending our decisions because know we made them (or reaffirmed them) from a place of confidence.