Advice Column: I Can't Stop Comparing Myself to Other Moms!

Millenial Moms Vs. Perfectionism

Hi!

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Today I’m bringing you the second installment of my advice column on parenthood.

Here is where we explore your parenting predicaments, your existential wonderings, the sticking points you’re bringing to the group chat or privately ruminating on when you get a rare moment alone.

I am (of course) full of my own unanswered questions about parenthood. That’s why this genre of writing appeals to me. I want to puzzle over the endless quandaries of raising kids and living life together.

I won’t have perfect answers, I’ll just share my thoughts as I make meaning of the very hard and very heartening parts of being a parent.

Thank you for being here.

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The Question

How do you avoid comparing yourself to other mothers and, in my case, feeling overwhelming bouts of jealousy? Like, why does their kid sleep through the night? What am I doing wrong as a mother? Her kid never throws tantrums when they are redirected. Why does my kid throw a fit when I ask them to stop? Why does she always look so put together, when currently my hair is falling out post-winter flu and my shirts feel tight around my belly and loose around my saggy boobs? 

I know some of this jealousy is due to social media (which is one of the reasons I recently deactivated my Instagram).

I also know that there are times when things feel great in my home/family and I don’t have waves of jealousy. But there are also times (perhaps that time of the month…) when I am more irritable and the comparison begins. I also truly think some of this has to do with the way millennial moms were raised (in the “girl boss” era) and the ingrained ideas that we can “have it all” and be “perfect.”

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When I had my first baby, I gained 40 lbs. With my second I gained more. And with my third, I stepped onto the scale at the doctor’s office backwards, asking the doctor only to report my weight if it became an actual health concern.

In the first pregnancy, I was shaken by how quickly the number on the scale ticked upward. I called my sister distraught after my 12-week appointment while I took tiny, nauseating bites of a thick cut french fry. “I’ve gained sixteen pounds,” I said. “I’m only in my first trimester!” Salty potato dissolved on my tongue, easing my churning tummy. “I’m eating french fries for lunch! It’s all I can stomach,” I told her. The subtext being — me, former salad-eating, health nut. What is happening to me?

At night, I’d side lie on the couch, holding my belly with one hand and scrolling my phone with the other. Occasionally I’d lift the free hand from the round mound of my stomach to zoom in on a picture of a pregnant woman on the internet who was notably smaller than me, and less tired looking, and usually wearing a flowing top that revealed her cute, stretch-mark free belly.

By the time I was pregnant with my second child, the cute pregnant person I was zooming in on was me in my previous pregnancy, the same me who’d ruthlessly compared herself to strangers on the internet. I looked so young then, so much more rested! I wasn’t chasing a toddler while combatting waves of nausea, and my belly at 20 weeks was a little ant hill compared to the mountain range I was dealing with now. Why had I been so cruel to a version of me I found enviable now?

When I grew bored of comparing present me to past me, there was ample material to pull from. Online and in person. Every fellow pregnant woman appeared glowing to me, confirmation that, yes, I was an unkempt ogre.

In my third pregnancy, I was coming off of two pregnancy losses, and was — against my own will — wiser, but also more anxious. I worried still about the shape of my body (does it ever end?!), but that worry was mostly overshadowed by concern about the viability of my pregnancy. When I zoomed in on pictures from my first and second pregnancy, envy welled but, but it was less about size and more about the carefree look in my eyes. Who was she? So naive, so blissfully unbothered by the fear of loss. When I felt that familiar pang of comparison to strangers or friends, it was because (as far as I knew) they weren’t carrying a crushing anxiety that at any moment their pregnancy would come to an untimely end.

I could keep going ad nauseam with examples of my own comparison fueled delusions (you are NOT ALONE here), but I chose this example because it demonstrates how time reveals our own misconceptions of self. One of the conundrums of being alive is the impossibility of seeing ourselves clearly. And, yes, the internet has exacerbated this problem to a psychedelic extent. When we are bombarded with messages about how to look, how to live, and who to be it’s increasingly difficult to see and honor who we actually are. And like my three pregnancies taught me, it often takes distance to see how wrong we can be about ourselves. That’s (partly) why they say youth is wasted on the young.

It’s also worth mentioning that the idea you have of other people - online and in real life - is incomplete. You are comparing the most complex parts of you to the most sanitized parts of them. Not to get too trippy, but you cannot inhabit their perspective. You cannot see yourself from their external vantage point or experience the fullness and messiness of their private and interior lives. Whatever story you’re telling yourself about how you appear to them is an illusion. Whatever story you’re telling based on how they appear to you is also an illusion.

I think you’re onto something when you say your tendency toward comparison is informed by certain millennial cultural currents. Surely the girl-boss brand of feminism didn’t prepare us for the unavoidable tradeoffs of motherhood. If you want to girl boss you’ll need to delegate child care. If you want to be the primary caretaker, you’ll have to adjust course in your career. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks when I had my first two children. Eventually I softened to the sacrifices required in parenthood, but I cycle back into self-doubt all the time. Am I doing enough outside of parenting? Have I lost myself in motherhood? A reframe that has helped me is that I don’t actually want it all. I want the most important things (to prioritize family, to be in community, to make contributions beyond family life to the extent that I’m able right now) and if not all at once, in their right season.

But often this perspective gets lost in the noise. It’s something I have to regularly reconnect with. Otherwise I’ll start feeling badly that I don’t have it all, all at once.

When I’m able to quiet the noise, I more easily connect with what’s true for me as a person and parent, separate from whatever parenting approach the algorithm is pushing. This is when I’m able to discern if sleep training suites me and my child, if I want to persist breastfeeding or begin weaning to support my own mental health, if I need to call on more support or — visa versa — cut back on childcare and spend more time with my kids. Answering these questions becomes much simpler when you’re not being blown around by the cultural winds or the unsolicited commentary of your friends and family.

I’m not - I should mention - in favor of tuning out all external inputs. Rather, when you turn to people you love and sources you trust, you deserve to receive thoughtful listening, an earnest curiosity that supports you in clearing the debris of unhelpful influence, so you can find an answer that suites you, your child, and your circumstances. If you’re bringing your parenting challenges to your trusted people and they are hitting you with one-size-fits-all parenting advice that sounds like an infographic on Instagram, that’s likely to leave you with the “what am I doing wrong as a mother?” feeling you describe. You have my permission to ignore prescriptive parenting advice and to trust yourself when you feel more opinions and information is counterproductive.

What I’ve found to be true, is that there lives inside most moms (excepting extreme examples) a knowing that you are uniquely wired to meet your child’s needs. It’s a truth that's entirely separate from the culture of mothering that favors one parenting approach over another, and then changes its mind again. It’s separate from the moms of the internet and even the moms you meet at playgroup. It is a knowing that would have you select yourself again and again to care for your child when they’re most in need of care. Tap into that. It will even tell you when to seek out expertise and when to trust your gut.

When you do tap in, you’ll be able to show up with more assuredness when you choose to cuddle up with your toddler to help them fall asleep, even if Sharon’s kids falls asleep independently. And you’ll be able to see more clearly the absurdity of judging yourself as anything other than a responsive, loving mother for doing it.

You’ll also be more equipped at discerning between envy that’s plain unkindness to yourself — projected onto the people you’re comparing to, but ultimately unrelated to them (these insecurities exist with or without them) — and an envy that might provide insight into some desire that needs tending to. Envy can show us what we want. Envy can show us where we aren’t living out our values. But we have to be very careful to distinguish between envy that’s self-directed cruelty, outwardly projected, and envy that’s alerting us to healthy desires. For example, I often experience envy related to writing. When other writers are publishing more frequently than I am, when their writing is really good, or when they are receiving positive feedback from readers lauding their words as “resonant” or “beautiful,” the comparison begins. How are they so consistent with their writing! where do they find the time? why isn’t my writing this beautiful or widely read?! Then there is a different kind of envy that comes up for me when someone’s writing goes viral, or they’re featured by Substack, or their work is picked up by a big publication. That envy is much more about what they HAVE than WHAT THEY DO. They have notoriety, they have conventional markers of success, they have a big readership, they have an agent or a book advance. The first kind of envy is easily translated into the language of inspiration. I’m inspired by the a writer’s commitment to their craft, by the quality of their work, by their ability to connect with an audience. This language puts me in touch with the places where I want to improve. I want to write more consistently, more honestly. I want to deepen my connection with my audience. This kind of envy can be instructive. It holds me to account, it asks me to get honest about how I’m standing in my own way. The other kind of envy is less actionable. It’s more deficit minded, highlighting what I lack by way of pedastalizing what someone else has. This kind of envy often leaves me thinking, why am I doing this? There’s no point. This kind of envy activates my inner asshole. This kind of comparison is a circuitous way of being mean to myself.

When you feel envy rising up, ask yourself what it’s trying to do. Is it your inner asshole speaking or more like a firm mentor shining a light on something you want to do differently?

The voice that says your shirt is ill-fitting…THAT’S THE ASSHOLE!

I once had a therapist named Billy. He was a sweet man that seemed elderly when I was 24. He was the kind of guy who probably played the guitar with lots of finger picking and he practiced yoga every day. Even if it was just leaning over to touch his toes between clients, he counted it. He was white haired and rosy cheeked and often a little sweaty in his Austin, TX office with the loudly whirring window unit. When I brought him concerns about my under employed boyfriend, a fracturing friendship, a tense conversation with my mom, he frequently told me to stop aiming for right and to start aiming for real. I find myself leaning on that a lot and I want to offer it to you.

There is not one way to do life and there is no one way to do parenting. There are, of course, egregiously wrong ways to care for children, but that’s not the context we’re working within right now.

What if you stopped trying to do this exactly right, and let yourself be real? A mom who is imperfect (ALL OF US!), a mom who is sometimes in flow, thriving with her kids, and a mom who is sometimes exhausted and full of doubt. What if you tried to stay calm, and often did, but sometimes didn’t? What if in some seasons you snapped at your kids more than you’d like, and then noticed, and recalibrated? What if when envy rises up in you like a vicious, wounded animal, you don’t meet it with even more criticism (why am I so self critical?!) inflaming the beast further?

I wrote an essay about buying new pants a few months ago. Here’s what I wrote:

“I bought some Madewell trousers because I saw someone else wearing them and I clicked their link and I liked the models jawline and unknowingly I thought that maybe by wearing them I’d become more like the woman with the link or the model with the zit-less jaw. So I did go ahead and buy them and when they arrived and I put them on, I sort of shifted around in front of the mirror like it’s not working. I changed my shirt a bunch of times but that wasn’t working either. I realized then that I’d bought the pants with expectations they couldn’t fill (pants too big to fill, if you will. except, actually they were a little tight). I was holding the real image of me in the pants (the me reflected in the mirror) in comparison to an imagined me. I was asking the pants to make me someone else entirely and in that way the pants represented failed aspirations, preordained”

I can’t know for sure, but I think you’re doing some version of this. Looking at a one dimensional image of someone else's motherhood like the pictures of the pants on the model and expecting it to translate to real life. But you’re a living, breathing, human, mom! Not a frozen image! You cant put on someone else’s version of motherhood — especially a flattened idea of it — and expect it to look the same on you. Motherhood isn’t a pair of pants. And anyway, it doesn’t work for pants either.

I love you,
Stephanie