Go With Your Gut Rather than Your Guilt: Mothering in the modern age.

Motherhood is in a state of chaos right now. We are working as hard as we can to raise happy, healthy, brilliant, kind, honest, hard-working, creative, lovely people but the messages we keep receiving tell us we are doing it wrong. We are messing it up. We are not enough.

Unfortunately those messages are not coming from some distant “other” that we can easily disregard as unhelpful. Most of those messages are coming from within our own ranks. It’s much harder to disregard judgement from other mommies. So we turn other mommies into “other” mommies. Those “other” mommies that sleep train / don’t sleep train / breastfeed / formula feed / cloth diaper / use disposables / babywear / love their strollers. Those “other” mommies have become the enemy because they are weaponizing our own fears against us. Social media walls, school pick up lines, and library story hours have become the battlegrounds.

A hundred years ago this would have been easier. We lived in smaller communities. We lived with multiple generations. Our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and the ladies at church would tell us how to soothe / feed / diaper / tend to our young. And the messages within those communities were more uniform. There was a culture to mothering in each community and it gave moms a wonderful gift – confidence in their choices. It is important to note that confidence came at a cost. A hundred years ago many children didn’t live to see their first birthday let alone their fifth.

So how is it that we are living in time of such unprecedented safety and yet we are scared of hurting our children beyond repair? This is where evolutionary biology has come to bite us in the rear. It was useful 1000 years ago to be extremely cautious. Don’t leave the baby next to that snake. Don’t leave the baby at all frankly because there might be a snake hiding behind that boulder. Don’t feed the baby that weird looking berry that no one has tried yet. Let someone else try it first. The anxious survived. Their DNA survived.

Fast forward to now. We don’t have too much of a snake problem. We have an excess of safe food to eat. But our brains are still looking for danger. Unfortunately, we are terrible at assessing risk. Case in point: many people are terrified of flying yet happily get into cars multiple times a day. We are vulnerable to fearing things that don’t pose great risks. Our brains assume there is danger because for tens of thousands of years there was a lot of danger. Where are the snakes? Where are the poison berries? I need to keep my baby safe from EVERYTHING!!! Except the scope of “everything” has changed. It now includes: diabetes, cancer, obesity, autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, broken bones, gastrointestinal issues, vision problems, hearing problems, eating disorders, Alzheimer’s, strokes, migraines, food allergies, eczema, acne, autoimmune disorders, cortisol, pesticides, gluten, sadness, and mediocrity.

In a time when mothering can look very different from one family to the next and when we are constantly on the lookout for all the ways our children will be injured (inside or out) how do we move forward? We read books, talk with our families, poll our friends, grill our pediatricians, google repeatedly, and ultimately choose the version of mothering that works for us. That is the best any of us can do.

But let us recognize our uncertainty and learn to tolerate it. Let us call out our own guilt and set it aside. It has no place here. If we let guilt and fear linger they lead us to throw judgement at others for doing things differently. Let us be responsible for our own choices and trust that others are responsible for theirs. We cannot know what combination of physical, mental, social, financial, familial, professional, and personal supports and pressures drive another mother. We need to trust one another and we need to trust ourselves.

We are doing our best. Each of us. If you have energy left over at the end of a long day of parenting and you choose to use it to read about parenting you win all the things. Even if you choose to use that energy to draw yourself a warm bath and pour a delightful glass of wine you win all the things. Your children are incredibly lucky to have you - don't let yourself forget it.