Moms, why are we so mean to each other?

Momland is engaged in a (un)civil war. A war over who is right and who is wrong, who is the better mother. A war which seeks to win validation for one side, validation of methods, of choices, of their way, being the right way, the only way, to raise a child. The unspoken, maybe even unrealised, goal of this war is to gain the validation that will conquer and quieten the deepest darkest insecurities that every mother feels, “Thank God I am right, my way is the best way, what I am doing is perfect, just look at how badly everyone else is doing, if that’s my competition, I am totally winning at mothering.”

A war where words are grenades, thrown with reckless abandon. No citizen is safe from the vicious and brutal assault of shame flung from across the ever-shifting battle lines. I fear all mothers have been faced with this behaviour of shaming, at varying levels during their journey of raising children.

But in truth, in this war, there are no winners, only losers.

I unwittingly became both a casualty and a battleground in this war. In 2018, I wrote an article about my battle with post-partum depression and the feelings I struggled with in the first 6 months or so of my daughter’s life. The general response was supportive and positive, with many women sharing their own incredibly personal stories suffering from this illness.

I use that word intentionally as it is not merely a case of the “cranks” or a mom who is too lazy or emotionally immature to accept the responsibility of her child. It is a chemical imbalance that requires medical intervention for symptoms to subside – symptoms which are not by the individual’s design nor can they be predicted prior to childbirth.

This outpouring of honesty and the palpable relief in sharing these women expressed was overwhelming and while some of the stories disturbed me as the viciousness of this disease is immense, what I found far more disturbing was the viciousness of the comments that blamed and shamed myself and the other mothers for their mental illness.

Aside from the obvious ignorance, self-righteousness and mistaking thoughts and feelings for actions, the cruelty of people’s words struck me. Some told me and the other’s who shared that we should not be parents and that we don’t deserve to call ourselves moms. Others felt that we should stop reproducing. But the hardest to read was the name-calling and labelling. Some implied or outright labelled my experience and feelings as “pathetic”, “ungrateful”, “weak”, “self-absorbed”, “whiny”, “childish”, “melodramatic”, “stupid”, “spoilt”, “psycho”, “irresponsible”, and, my personal favourite, “selfish bitch”.

As my story is far from the worst example of what some women go through, some comments even took the tone of competition, despite the fact that at no point did I try to claim the prize for the most horrific story.

Even those who suffer from mental illness, who should have some level of understanding of the complexity and anomalousness of mental illness, felt entitled to judge another’s experience of mental illness when it did not align to their own.

This experience led me to ponder this shaming, judging and competing, to consider what purpose can explain why Momland is littered with piles of shame, especially around hot button topics. There are too many to mention them all, but I want to highlight a few that seem to be universal enough for us all to have experienced this phenomenon in some part.

Shame on you not being woman enough

Anyone who has delivered via C-Section will know all too well the patronizing and sometimes disdainful look shot in their direction on admitting to this birth type. And in one short admission, “um, no I didn’t have a natural birth, I had a cesarean”,  the shame piles up. Shame on us for choosing a different path, or not choosing in the case of an emergency, but shame regardless. Shame on us for not being woman enough to push and tear. Shame on us for taking “the easy” way out. Shame on us for denying our maternal instincts. Shame on us for denying our child the birth process nature intended.

Shame on you for feeding your child

Every week there seems to be a new example of women being chastised for breastfeeding in public spaces. For some reason, I cannot begin to fathom, breastfeeding in public elicits a reaction so strong in people that they have even been driven to call the police in an attempt to make mom’s put their breasts away.

Shame on us for whipping our breasts out and feeding our child with our disgusting bodily fluid –  otherwise known as milk. Shame on us for not feeding our children in a bacteria-ridden cubicle of the nearest public toilet. Shame on us for not covering our child in a blanket on a 36 degree centigrade day, just so our modesty is maintained. Shame on us for subjecting society to such smut.

While it is shameful to breastfeed in public, not breastfeeding at all is shamed as a mortal mommy sin. Shame on us for not trying hard enough. Shame on us for denying our child the best. Shame on us for not doing as nature intended. Shame on us for not cherishing a sacred exchange between mother and child. Shame on us for selfishly choosing our nipples and sanity over our child’s nutrition. Shame on us for compromising our child’s future health, growth, mental and emotional stability, development and potential to become president because we failed to breastfeed them.

This doesn’t even touch on the shame of the moms who stopped breastfeeding too soon or have kept breastfeeding too long. That shame is as deep as the days are long.

Shame on you for how and where your baby sleeps.

Who would have thought where, when and how your child sleeps could be a minefield of shame bombs? And yet it is. There several different advocates for different sleeping arrangements. But they all roughly fall into two groups – those who sleep with their kids and those who do not.

The former is shamed for being weak in their discipline of their kids and will ultimately raise brats. Co-sleepers are overly, if not unhealthily, attached to their children. This pattern of behaviour is not conducive to raising an independent, self-sufficient adult. You are choosing to put your own clingy desires ahead of your child’s need for a sound night’s sleep.

Conversely, those who choose to let their child sleep in their own bed in their own room, are choosing their own comfort over their child’s need for security. The way sleep trainers callously let their children cry it out in their cot, ignoring the distraught cries of an innocent baby that feels abandoned by those contracted to protect and care for said baby, verges on psychopathic.

This discipline will undoubtedly enact untold damage on your child’s psyche, that will result in them never being able to maintain a healthy relationship as adults. And they will end up filling their lonely bed with a myriad of sexual partners trying to fill the void your left when they were babies.

Surely, where and how a child sleeps is not going to fundamentally affect their ability to thrive as an adult? But sleeping arrangements are not even the most incendiary provocation.

Career and motherhood is without a doubt the biggest bone of contention and dissonance in Momland.

Shame on you for going to work, but also shame on you for staying home.

Those of us who have returned to work, whether by choice or by necessity, have felt the weight of not only our own internal guilt but the shame gifted in a passive-aggressive wrapper with a bow made of one part pity and one part disappointment. And in that instant, a dump truck of shame lands on the victim. Shame on us for going back to work and leaving our child in the care of others. Shame on us for missing out on our child’s childhood. Shame on us for not being able to afford a single income family structure. Shame on us for wanting a career. Shame on us for not want to give our careers up. Shame on us for being selfish and putting our careers ahead of our most important job – being a mom. Shame on us for taking these precious and fleeting years for granted by being absent. Shame on us for being power hungry, money grubbing, anti-maternal she-men.

There seems to be a recurrent theme amongst moms about who has the easier ride, who took the easy way out. In relation to the working mom – there is a perception that this mom, is escaping the hardship of being a full-time mother. She is having a little daily eight hour holiday. She gets to leave her child in the care of some other poor sod and skip off into Adultland where she is free to come and go as she pleases, being all carefree childless and shit.

For most working moms, this is not a holiday, but rather an endless cycle of feeling torn between two jobs. When they are at work they are guilty of not being with their kids. And when they are with their kids they are still worrying about their work responsibilities.

I am sure that there is many a stay at home mom who has averted her eyes under the horn-rimmed glare of the modern feminist when uttering – “Umm, actually I don’t work, my husband and I decided I would stay at home to raise the kids.”. Shew, steel yourself, mommy, and get your body armour on your in a for a bumpy ride.

Shame on us for not being strong enough to fight for what you really want, which if you weren’t paying attention is your career. Shame on us for not being able to afford childcare, even if mom goes to work. Shame on us for setting women back 20 years.

How many times have you overheard or been a part of a conversation that goes somewhere along the lines of this; “Oh, Jane so good to see you. What have you been up to since graduating?”. Jane responds in a small voice; “Wow, Marcy, long time. Well, I worked as an attorney for a couple of years and then I had some kids. And now, well now, I am just a stay at home mom. I guess?”.

To which Marcy replies, with a facial expressive arrangement usually reserved for funerals, “Oh, Jane, I am sure that must be just as fulfilling. At least you don’t have to deal with the hectic stress and demands of work anymore. I often fantasise about going for lunch with the girls and watching soapies in the middle of the afternoon. I am actually envious of your freedom”.

On behalf of Jane and every other SAHM’s, I scoff.

I don’t know when society decided that raising kids was not a real job. That it was not stressful, demanding, time-consuming and in serious need of danger pay.

And yet it has and thus SAHMs are shamed for their day job. Again Momland turns on its own citizens in an attempt to make one sub-culture feel better about themselves and their choices. And the horde is almost always chanting the same thing – “you are not as good a mom as me because I took the hard way, the painful way, the impossible way, the inconvenient way and you? You are taking the easy way out, the selfish way, the lazy way.”.

There are a hundred different actions and choice deserving of shame – many involve what you allow your kids to eat, like, feeding ready-made microwave meals, letting them have sugar, only letting them eat vegan. Others involve their schooling, their interaction with adults, the way you discipline, the room for shame is endless and infinite.

We are all guilty of this shameful behaviour, the behaviour of shaming others. We should be ashamed of ourselves for inciting this (un)civil war.

Shame on us for dispensing judgement without considering the devastation you reap with your words. Shame on us for throwing sanctimonious and cruel grenades at one another from behind the safety and anonymity of a computer screen.

Shame on us for our self-entitled belief that we should and do cut down another who is only trying to do what’s best for her family – even if what’s right for her is wrong for us and our own private Idaho. Shame on us for opening our mouths, unsolicited, and letting thoughtless and callous opinions pour out. Shame on us for being so thoroughly arrogant that we believe that there is only one way to raise a child, only one way to be a good mom – and that is your way.

This war is not just about shame but about self-aggrandization, it’s about martyrdom. Shame on you for not sacrificing what I have. Shame on you for not working as hard as I have. Shame on you for not suffering as I have suffered in the name of my children. By shaming another mom, we prove how much better we are, how much more we have suffered.

Anne Roderique Jones hypothesises in a 2017 Marie Claire article, The Rise of The Mean Moms, is that life imitates art, and the 21st-century art often depicts the lionized caricature of the mean girl. The girls and young women who watched Mean Girls, The Simple Life, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives in the early to mid-2000s are now moms who are living out what they have learnt.

This shaming behaviour follows the basic premise of bullying or if you want to get all primal – gain stature by tearing others around you.

A 2015 study by researchers at Simon Fraser University found that bullying provided an adaptive edge for our ancestors. And as bullies are known to use this attack first, ask questions later approach to dealing with their own personal self-esteem and validation issues, it often has little to do with motherhood or the actual behaviour they are tearing down and everything to do with their need to be seen as valid and valuable.

Throw in a few centuries of patriarchy where women felt compelled to compete in order to not end up homeless, penniless, manless and living in the gutters. And you have the near-perfect recipe for malicious mom-on-mom warfare. Add in 21st-century technology and boom you have yourself a dirty bomb ready for detonation and the destruction of innumerable moms on the frontlines.

The proliferation of platforms from which to shame has not helped any. In previous generations moms only had access to their immediate circle of support – doctors, nurses, their own parents, their friends and siblings – for advice, thus the battle was more a brawl, than a full on war.

In today’s world where Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are a routine part of everyday life, motherhood is not only competitive, it has become a spectator sport too – who can bake the perfect birthday cake, whose nursery is worthy of a double page spread in Elle Décor, which mom’s newborn shoot was the cutest and most creative, whose toddler looks like he just stepped out of the advert for Baby Gap?

Motherhood has become like the best Instagram feeds, perfectly curated, deliberately styled and strategically framed and completely unrealistic for the majority of us mere mortals.

The simple answer to the unsolicited opinions of Momland is that the vast majority of children tend to grow up and manage despite you and what you have done.

As one of the smartest and best dads I know, Jack Pearson, said, “We’re their parents. We do the best we can. But at the end of the day what happens to them, how they turn out, that’s bigger than us.”

What I find most ironic in all of this, is that I am 99.99999% sure that all moms have their own personal internal grinch, that little voice inside that laughs when you mess up, that plants seeds of doubt when you are certain you know what to do, that whispers nagging comparisons between you and another mom. That little voice that is not actually very little and cannot be drowned out by even the loudest of screams that reverberate around your skull. That little voice with whom you share a body.

And that little voice is better than anyone at providing a never-ending stream of judgement, opinions and shame to make you question your parenting choices.

For me personally, I know I am always second guessing myself, never sure I am doing the right thing. Every morning I wake up thinking I am stuffing this mothering thing up royally. There is nothing Momland can throw at me that I haven’t already thrown at myself a million times before.

So, I guess all that left to say is shame on you, Momland, for assuming you are better at shaming me than me. Didn’t your mother ever teach you, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.” In other words, just STFU.