I watch moms online show their perfect looking home and then sell you their cleaning system PDF if you comment “CLEAN” on their post to share how it changed her life and maybe it can change yours for the better too. and then I scroll through the comments and see people mocking her or whining, “must be nice for you! I don’t have time for this.”
and then a few posts below I see a mom online share her real messy house in order to make other moms feel seen and not alone. and when I scroll through those comments I’ll find things like “ew, I could never live like this” or “this is child abuse!’ you can find this dichotomy in every little corner of motherhood at any given time just by opening your social media apps.
you may not even have what your house looks like on your radar at the time. and then BAM you’re assaulted with questioning yourself, is my house clean enough? is it messy enough for my kids to feel like they can play? and all the sudden you’re in a spiral you otherwise would have never considered.
the internet’s version of motherhood isn’t real. social media isn’t real. and yet every time we scroll, if we’re not careful, we let ourselves take on other people’s stories, values and priorities and suddenly claim them as ours. and then when we don’t live up to these new stories, values and priorities even though we tried the cleaning system on the PDF, we feel like a failure.
I’ll never forget during Covid quarantine being suddenly without childcare with my 18 month old while I watched childless people make sourdough and start painting with their time at home and I thought “if only!” and then I found an account that posted about toddler activities that will keep your kid busy and it felt like lightning has struck!
if I just set up this activity maybe I can try and make the most of the terrible time too. and so I set up this activity for her, taping toilet paper tubes to a larger cardboard box, I got pom poms and wine bottle corks (lol) for her to drop down the tubes, just like the Instagram video told me to. I set it up and had decided to do some experimental photography stuff while she was super busy with the activity I’d set up (I was a professional photographer in a past life) and I felt like I’d figured it alllll out.
but as I turned my back to get my camera set up, instead of doing the activity as I showed it to her, she took the dog’s water bowl and dumped it all over the cardboard activity, essentially melting it.
moms all over the comment section of that video cheered and wrote things like “this entertained my toddler for 30 minutes and I got to have my coffee hot!” and my toddler was barely entertained for 1 second. it took me years to realize that my kids just don’t respond to those types of activities.
the things that actually entertain them for large chunks of time are things of their own creation, which I do have activities I will set up for them where I put out a few bins and just say “make something with this” and that works far better for my kids than a predetermined activity.
and so today, I want to bust a myth that no one is quite pinpointing or saying out loud and that myth is this: good moms find the system that works.
and not just any system, but the perfect system. the system that works 100% of the time, every time. when in reality it goes a little bit more like Paul Rudd’s character in Anchorman when he says “60% of the time, it works every time”.
but truly, I can’t tell you how many times in motherhood I’ve thought to myself, if I just had a better system, a better routine, an evidence based instruction manual then everything would be perfect and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything ever again! motherhood solved.
and so we buy the cleaning system PDF, we set up the cardboard activity, we try the meal planning. and it works for a few weeks maybe, maybe it doesn’t even work for 1 second like my cardboard activity and then eventually we’re back to square one, feeling like crap and a crappy mom. because good moms find systems that work! and you tried on the system, or systems in my case, and failed (over and over again) and therefore must be doing something wrong.
while we’re busy trying to find systems to control the chaos what we’re missing is that we’re not perfectly shaped pieces in a machine and neither are our kids. I was listening to a guided meditation this week where she said, “the words perfect and human are antonyms” and it’s one of those things that when you hear it you’re like “well, obviously” but to actually take it on is a whole other thing.
because I know for me, I can easily get swept up in the mirage of perfect, just read my last post about not having slow living kids, and be constantly on the hunt for the next way to optimize motherhood and parenting or anything else really. it’s much easier, for me at least, to feel like I’m controlling the schedule, the system, the kids, the house than it is for me just sit and allow it all to happen.
I was even guilty of this recently, as in yesterday (lol), telling my group of writing moms that I trained my kids to sleep until 7am and my older kids aren’t allowed to come out of their rooms until 7am. I was selling my system to them but that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to work for them. and then of course, this morning, as I’m writing this post, my son woke up screaming at 6AM. and even in the conversation, we talked about how I was particularly motivated to stay consistent in creating this routine and they might not be as motivated, which is totally okay!
and that just further pushes my point. we’re not all meant to do this the same way. to have the same systems or the same routines. and it’s exhausting to keep trying on other people’s systems when they weren’t meant for us in the first place and so we are set up to fail from the beginning.
and then on top of that is the expectation that it’s supposed to work 100% of the time is just a really impossible expectation and leaning more into Brian Fantana’s philosophy of 60% of the time, it works every time, feels way more realistic when you’re working with little humans.
just this weekend I came rightttt up against the very problem I’m naming here.
we’d just moved, which is its own special flavor of exhausting, and we’d had an afternoon and evening from chaotic hell with our kids. by bedtime my sanity was hanging by a thread. and so, I tried to channel my ancestors, the mothers who came before me, both grandmothers had 7 children each, but they are both gone now and so instead I gripped the kitchen island, head hanging low wondering “what am I doing wrong here?” I turned to the internet instead. and not just any internet, my therapist and close personal friend, ChatGPT.
into the little chat box I typed a message that was less a request and more a flare shot into the sky…
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.