You know, when I became a mom, I noticed something. Oh, it
wasn’t just that I could change a really stinky diaper without
gagging (although that is a skill of which I’m quite proud).
You know, when I became a mom, I noticed something. Oh, it wasn’t just that I could change a really stinky diaper without gagging (although that is a skill of which I’m quite proud). And it wasn’t that I could miraculously understand baby talk when prior to parenthood I couldn’t even understand people with British accents.
No, what I noticed was that moms are constantly comparing themselves to other moms.
If you’re a working mom, you compare yourself to a stay-at-home mom and vice versa. If you’re a mom who can’t cook and knows the names of most of the staff at fast food joints all over town, you compare yourself to a mom whose homemade creations make Martha Stewart jealous.
I don’t know why we do this. I just know that we do. Take a recent University of Maryland study, for example. The study found that mothers today, even with all the juggling we do, spend more time with our kids than our counterparts did in the past.
Now you’d think this would cause “yippees” to be heard throughout America. After all, spending time with our kids is a good thing, right? Of course it is. Oh, all right. Maybe if you have a spectacularly hormonal teenager moping around the house, it’s not such a great thing. But for the most part, more time with the kids is good.
But you know that across the country, women are now taking this study to heart and marking their calendars to see if they measure up. And some will find that they do spend the average 14 hours per week with their kids. And some will find that they spend more. And still others will find that they spend less.
And I can guarantee you that no matter what, each mother will feel guilty about the result.
Why the heck do we do this to ourselves? We have so many other things to worry about. Look, I’d rather worry about whether that thing in the back of my fridge that’s green and gooey is going to come to life one day and attack me. I’d rather worry about why Sylvester Stallone’s forehead doesn’t move and is remarkably wrinkle-free when the rest of his face looks like it got squished in one of those old-fashioned washing machine wringers.
But instead, I got caught up in the hoopla and actually counted the hours I spent with Junior last week. How crazy is that? I’d never wondered about it before. But now that the study is being publicized I just have to know. Do I measure up?
It’s nuts, I know. But I also know that I’m not the only mother who spent time with the calendar, making sure I didn’t spend one minute less than the study’s average of 14 hours with my child. We all compare ourselves. We do it every day, and we do it without even being aware of it.
Take fast food, for example. We all know it’s bad. We all know it’s fattening. I don’t know one person on earth who doesn’t realize that a piece of potato, fried in oil and smothered in salt is delicious and fattening all at the same time. And we all know that our children’s growing bodies do not need to be stuffed with potatoes fried in oil and smothered in salt. And we all know mothers who deny that their children have ever been to a fast food place.
And we all know that you will see a huge, long line at every fast food place in South County on a Friday night at dinnertime. But we don’t admit this out of fear that we won’t measure up to the other moms.
So I really don’t like this study. Now it might be that I’m grumpy today. Or it could just be that I am really tired of making sure I don’t fail my family by falling short of the moms to whom I compare myself. And that’s why, while I think this study is good news, I also hate it because it’s just one more measurement. One more way for we mothers to compare ourselves to others and feel superior or inferior.
And that’s just something I don’t need. I won’t compare myself again. I won’t compare the time I spend with my son. I won’t compare the stuff I’ve bought him or the food he eats. I’ll just do my best. I don’t think there’s any comparison for that.
