Whenever you “join” a new something, there is invariably a group of people who have already joined or are already doing the thing you are just beginning to do. They represent the culture of your new activity/identity. There is such a culture for moms, especially new moms. New moms of 12 month olds are lightyears ahead in knowledge and experience than those such as myself, a new mom of two 7-week olds. And I have a good amount more practical know-how than someone who gave birth yesterday.

If this culture system works as it should, those with more experience are equipped to provide mentoring and emotional support to those who are new, so that they can turn around and offer the same to someone who comes along after them. (I began thinking about this during Matt’s parents’ visit when Lynette was reading a book about spiritual mentoring. I realized that mentorship is crucial for passing along any sort of valuable insight and experience… spiritually as well as in many other activities, like parenting). It is good for me to spend time talking with Hazel and my two moms and with friends who are in my situation! I should come away thinking that I’m doing the best I can and that this is possible and we can not only survive, but thrive during this time! Matt and I have called/emailed friends who are already parents of singletons and of twins with countless questions and gotten beautiful support from them. These people are initiating me into Mom Culture with love and kindness.

As always though, culture can be clique-ish. As a woman, I have made comparisons between myself and other women my whole life… in elementary school, I was really short compared to other girls and my hair was really long. Then in junior high, I had fewer zits but bigger glasses and more arm hair and braces. In high school, I achieved these levels of grades and participated in these activities and my friends were similarly-minded. In college, I finally learned to like myself for me and gravitated toward other women who did the same! In grad school, I learned to think about my schooling and my work within the framework of my faith… all pieces of me fit into my identity as a Christ-follower, so how do I go about thinking and working and being a speech-pathologist like a Christ-follower would? You get the picture.

I think other women out there will agree that we compare the negatives too… who is prettier, thinner, smarter, funnier, more godly, more confident, sexier, blah blah blah. There is always someone more than we are in these categories and we are quick to find someone who is less. And somehow, that makes us feel better?

Moms are no different, so the Mom Culture can be a painful initiation at the same time that it can be a beautifully mentored one if you don’t fit into the cliques. I think this begins with well-crafted intentions and can fall quickly into faulty logic. Moms
a) love their child/ren with a deep, deep love
b) want to do the best momming that they possibly can.
I’m no different, and neither are you. (As a sidenote, dads also love their children and do the very best they can, but I’m not a dad, so I can’t as easily define what that looks like).

These are great intentions! Then we take action. We think long and hard about what it means to be loving and to do our best and we make decisions based on these thoughts. There’s alot of variety here… what one mom does as her best looks very different from what another mom does. But each mom fully loves and fully devotes herself to trying, so we could say, “Mom A and Mom B are equally loving and caring and devoted, even though the ways they go about it look very different.” But that sounds vague because it isn’t very measurable and people like to know exactly where they stand. This is where things get tricky.

The details set in and we question ourselves and those around us… do you have a schedule or do you wait for your child to let you know what they need? Do you stay home with your kids or work? If you stayed home, for how long? Six weeks? A few months? A year? Until they began school? Forever? If you work, is it part-time? Full-time? Do you breast-feed, bottle-feed, or formula-feed? If yes to one of the above, how long did you do it before switching? Which one did you switch to? Do you have two parents in your home or just one? Is there a grand-parent or other caregiver? If you started as a single parent, did you add another parent eventually? If you started with two, did one go away? Do you use these diapers or these diapers? The list goes on, and only gets more intense as our children get older. Do you send them to this type of school or this one? Do you let them eat this kind of food or not? Do you use this kind of discipline or this one?

The faulty logic sets in right after this stage. After answering the questions factually, VALUES are attached. “Loving my child and doing my best means THIS. Therefore, if I don’t do THIS and I choose something else, I’m not doing my best and I don’t love my child. I’m a bad mom. Furthermore, all of the rest of you don’t love your child and do your best well enough unless you do THIS too. You are bad moms, especially compared to me.” Someone chooses differently than we would and we internally gasp at how they could DARE to make that choice! This is a painful process because none of us are perfect and we all wish we could do more. We are very aware of what we don’t have to offer, more aware than we are of what we do have to offer. We forget that a) we love our kids and b) we are doing the best we can. We forget to give ourselves grace for the areas that we wish were different and we forget to feel good about the areas that we are doing a bang-up job. This gets VERY dangerous when we translate that lack of grace for ourselves toward other moms. “Loving your child and doing your best means you do these defined parameters of activities. If you don’t, you’re not the mom I am and you should get on that. Immediately, please. Let me know when you’re doing it right.” Ugh! I think that this *do as I do or you suck* mentality is really just a cover-up for lack of confidence and a bit of panic… we have NO idea if what we are doing for our kids is enough and so we just keep going and tell ourselves that the few things we know are good enough. It’s hard to be a mentor to new moms when we aren’t sure we have anything to offer! So we may resort to offering generally-accepted rules– “Good moms breast-feed. Good moms don’t work. Good moms give up who they are for the sake of their family and don’t have any personal needs.” It’s hard to sound realistic and honest and kind when it comes down to just a list of impersonal rules, isn’t it? And are we so sure that everyone else agrees with us? I know alot of good moms who do things in lots of different ways!

Moms out there, let’s have this culture of ours be a culture of grace, you know? I’m a new member so I don’t know how it all works yet, but I need whatever the best I can offer is to be okay. And you need yours to be okay. We don’t need more areas to make comparisons, that’s for sure! Momming is such a deeply personal endeavor because it involves little precious lives that we are responsible for! So it is especially painful to feel like you aren’t cutting it or to feel like other people think you suck. I need to remember to offer grace to other moms for any effort they can put in, because wow, they need that grace as much as I do. Maybe we are all loving our kids and doing the best we can, no matter how different that looks.