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[papaya]

I think I just found a blog post that explains why some people are so freaking awful in the parenting communities I read. It's worth a read, but this is what really jumped out at me:

These conversations all go south precisely BECAUSE we all care so deeply. No one wants to be told she's a bad mother, because deep down she feels like one sometimes

Comments

[papaya]

I imagine that you weren't thinking of your brother-in-law or his kids when you made that remark, though. It was probably more like those, "We've all co-slept and none of my kids are dead yet...oh, shit" moments.

but I do think a lot less of the one person I discovered leaving a smugly superior comment in a breastfeeding community about how she felt sorry for all those poor babies who were being deprived of the best thing there is because their mothers were too worried about keeping their boobs perky.

Oh, I left that community way behind on the day I saw a bunch of mothers patting themselves on the back for, oh, I don't know, actually loving their kids or whatever. One woman commented about her friend going to a wedding without her baby and how sad that was since she obviously didn't care enough to be tethered to the kid. Cue a bunch of other people jumping in about how selfish she was, and how could a few hours of fun be worth the trauma and neglect of not breastfeeding blah blah blah.

All I could think was that while I was too nervous to do that, I did (do, actually) still have these moments where I really need to just get away and be by myself.

Oh, hey! Cold medication kicking in. Aaaahhh...

[theafaye]

I think I remember reading that discussion, or at least hearing about it. I just think that who is anyone to judge what someone else does? I mean, I remember reading about a friend of mine who went for a weekend away from the baby when he was three months old and raising an eyebrow at that because at that stage there's no way I could have been away from my child for a whole weekend (especially since my breasts would have protested loudly), but how do I know what living with her child is like? Maybe he cries all night and day. Maybe he has chronic colic. Maybe he needs to be held all the time and her arms are tired. Just because *I* don't want a weekend away from my baby doesn't mean that she's automatically a bad mother or doesn't have darned good reason to need it.

These days, I have Friday nights off. There's always good(bad) reality TV on and I do absolutely nothing from 7pm onwards, so if I haven't had dinner, I won't eat if my husband doesn't feed me because it's Friday and when I say I do nothing, I do NOTHING. Quite frankly, I think you're a much better mother when you don't martyr yourself to your child and take some time out to remember who you are. There's spending 24/7 with your child because you genuinely enjoy that and you find it easy and then there's doing it to get oneupmanship against your friends. The former you only find out that's what they do by accident; the latter make darned sure you and everybody else know about it.