Motherhood is Not a Competitive Sport, Part 4 (The Last One!)

By Stephanie

The Only Opinion that Matters

Like any stay-at-home mom, I live at my place of employment. I do not clock out at 5pm.  Even after my kids go to bed at 8:30, 8:47, 9:08, 9:23 and finally stay there at 9:45, I am not finished.  My husband and I have a carefully negotiated process for deciding who gets up when one of our twins (not our toddler, mind you, it’s the four-year-olds!) wake up with a bad dream or needing another blanket.  It involves calculating who needs to get up earlier, who went to bed later, and is finally decided by who’s better at faking sleep.

The duties never get put on hold, and they never end. I don’t get a yearly performance review. I have no supervisor.  I do have a business partner, but we decided some time ago that I would trust him to do his best at producing an income and he would trust that I’m doing my best at managing the household.

 How, then do I decide if I’m doing a good job?  Nobody else has my kids.  No one else works with the constraints of my microscopic kitchen. I’m relatively certain no other woman knows what it’s like to be married to my husband and how much time needs to be invested in our marriage to keep it happy. I’m on my own here.

Every day I set goals: things I absolutely have to do, things I should probably do, and things that even in my wildest fantasy I won’t do, but I like to pretend there’s still a possibility.  And at the end of the day I judge myself according to the number of items checked off.

I’ve gone through endless cycles of being too hard on myself, then deciding I don’t care because I have a bunch of little kids and everybody (including myself) is just going to have to understand, okay? Right now I’m (of necessity) taking care of the “have to’s,” then my physical health… and then the day is over and it’s time to go to bed.

The one thing I’m not doing, because I have learned the hard way that it only leads to more frustration, is compare myself to other mothers.  I will always find other moms who cook better meals, or have a better chore system, or a cleaner house. If I can learn something useful from what they do I’ll try it, but often their circumstances are sufficiently different from mine that their methods won’t work for me. That’s okay.

I have learned, from necessity, to judge for myself whether or not I could be doing better.  That judgment is based on hard-won knowledge of me and my capabilities, not comparisons, and not what anyone else tells me. Snotty comments and idle gossip occasionally threaten to distract me, but the older I get, the easier it is to ignore them. (And avoid the perpetrators – and thankfully, there are not many in my acquaintance.)

I am a woman of faith who believes a loving Heavenly Father cares even more than I do about my children. I pray every day to do a good job, and it has been my experience that if I listen carefully, He will tell me what He thinks.  Generally speaking, I get nothing but encouragement from that direction.  The few times I’ve been given some heavenly guidance, it has come gently.

My husband is another source of constant support. Whenever I get discouraged or feel like I’m failing, he reassures me that I’m a good mom and he knows I’m doing my best.

The only person who can derail this train, then, is me.

This is my last post for Raised by a Village, and if anything I’ve written here has meaning for anyone, I hope it’s this: We mothers have an incredibly important job to do, and we need to learn to gather all the information we can, and then trust our instincts when we need to make a decision.

 I am the expert when it comes to my kids. I know what works in my house and what doesn’t. 

My opinion is the one that matters here. The only one that matters.