I have a couple of friends — real friends, women I genuinely like and enjoy spending time with — who for a while I was seriously considering breaking up with on Facebook. I know that sounds passive-aggressive, and maybe it is, but I sort of reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore.
Facebook is a truly, deeply weird planet. I mean, I am aware that every Facebook page is a carefully curated, highly edited version of real life; a place where our children’s foibles are just cute as beans, and our hair looks good, and we’re perpetually on vacation or at the pumpkin patch or scoring a goal at soccer or something (unless we’re being ironic, of course, in which case we’re dressed in ’80s prom dresses on New Years Eve, but our hair still looks good). I’m guilty of it, too.
But some people take this online persona to new heights: Why vacation in Disneyland or Tahoe when you can be at EuroDisney and Gstaad and Bora Bora (all in one year!)? Why settle for soccer goals at the local park-and-rec when you can be the den mother of a traveling team for 5-year-olds with Olympic ambitions? Why post deals from Target when you can post “deals” from LuxeLife (and these are your own vintage Chanel bags you’re selling for a song, btw)? Why just complete a run when you can complete an Ironman? In Hawaii! And then celebrate with your three-year-old at the most expensive white-tablecloth restaurant on the island where she displays perfect manners and engages in witty repartee with the sommelier!
Envy me! I am perfect and my life is ah-mazing!
It gets under my skin sometimes, is all I’m saying.
(In the interest of fairness, I should mention that I take separate but equal issue with people who post about how the chili they ate for lunch gave them some wicked indigestion or how pap smears are uncomfortable. Please stop.)
I was feeling a bit snarky, thinking all these thoughts. I know it’s my own insecurity driving it, after all. Should my 4-year-old be able to hit a baseball that’s pitched to him, rather than just off a tee? If I trained for a ToughMudder, would I also have arms like Kelly Ripa? Sigh. I want to go to Tahiti, too. Then I read two complementary blog posts on HuffPo: this one on working moms and this one on stay-home moms. The posts brought up some interesting fodder, but it was the comments following that really got me going. WHOA, these are some angry, bitchy women readers!
Consider the following:
“Any healthy mother that is a stay at home mom after her kids are the age of 6 is nothing but lazy. At least go volunteer or something — but if you’re staying at home to take care of your kids after they get home from school at 3 – 4 p.m. – then you’ve got issues that have nothing to do with nurturing your children.”
“Going to work and juggling tasks is hard – but not like raising children – and if you think 2 hours in the am and 2 hrs before bed is hard … you havent even begun. Lil humans need your time and all the reasons why you should be at work dont mean anything to them.”
These are MOMS. Writing these things to and about OTHER MOMS. Really, it’s so strange. (Sometimes I think it would be sort of cool to go “viral” and have a lot of people reading this blog (as fascinating as it is, it’s fairly low-circ, if you can believe it). But then I read these comments on HuffPo and I think: Aack! I would fear for my safety if people were writing like that about me. The vitriol! I mean, aren’t we allowed to have an opinion or — crazy thought — a dialogue, even?)
Now that I blog, I read more blogs, and I am increasingly frustrated by this mom-on-mom cyber-bullying — or, as it is apparently called, The Mommy War. We live in a culture of maternal one-upsmanship, where those who choose one path, be it to work or to stay home, to home-school, to formula-feed, to vaccinate, must justify and defend that position against the detractors.
The problem is that there are endless choices we are faced with as mothers (and fathers), from the minute we conceive until well after our kids go off to college. And there are endless mitigating factors — financial, familial, unforeseen — which (get this!) are subject to change, suddenly and without warning. Someone loses a job. Someone dies. Another unexpected pregnancy. A windfall inheritance. So how, in the name of reason, can we possibly be so rigid in our definitions and expectations of motherhood?
My dad has a habit of reminding us, “The minute you think you have on thing figured out, something else will change.” In other words: You’re never going to get it down perfectly, so cut yourself some slack. (And everyone else, while you’re at it.)
Which brings me back to Facebook. And the fact that I should really cut my perfect friends some slack. I mean, good for them. Carefully-curated or not, I can take some inspiration from their travel wardrobes, and hey, they are obviously doing something right in the manners department if their kids can sit still and speak nicely with the waiter in Nantucket. Perhaps rather than comparisons, there are lessons to be learned.
Or maybe I should get off Facebook.
But then what would I do with all these cute pictures of my kids?
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