Over Christmas break, I became obsessed with the idea that I wanted another baby even though my soul knew this to be untrue.
I did not want another baby, but I’d read a blog that made me think I did. On the blog, a woman had described her birth story as an experience so spiritual it bordered on holy. A process that strengthened the bonds between herself, her husband, and God.
And here sat I, knowing full well that birth for me had never strengthened my bond to anyone but my anesthesiologist and Preparation H.
Her idealized description of giving birth had confused me so much that it led me to believe I wanted things that I didn’t actually want.
In short, it made me jealous.
It wasn’t an isolated occurrence. Countless times I’ve logged onto Facebook, Twitter, or my favorite blogs only to see vintage-filtered vignettes of other people’s seemingly perfect lives. There are my friends, on tropical vacation (again). There are my favorite bloggers, wearing artsy duds, sitting in their homes that look like exact replications of the Anthropologie catalog. And there are their children, perpetually glossy-haired and rosy-cheeked and smiling.
Meanwhile, here I sit in my untidy home in the cold of January, wearing an old college t-shirt. My kids are fighting in the background. Reading these blogs, seeing these profiles, often feels like browsing a fashion magazine. It’s fun to look at, but afterward I feel inferior and inadequate and ugly and fat.
The problem is that so often people’s Facebook photos and status updates capture fleeting moments of happiness and, by nature of social media, pin them down like that one perfect moment represents what life is like all the time. I walk away thinking that if only I could do what this person has done, I would be as happy, always, as they were in that moment. Like all my problems could be solved by the perfect glittery scarf or a beautifully photographed craft hour. Like there’s something wrong with the truth of a messy, un-photogenic life.
It’s not that I don’t understand the urge. As we learned from Facebook’s IPO filings this week, it seems nearly everyone is on Facebook—people I went to high school with, former teachers and professors, current coworkers. My mom. And dozens of people I never see in real life. Of course there is the instinct to present one’s best self. But all of us, collectively, posting only rosy images has added up to a great cultural misunderstanding. A place where we all believe that other people are having a better time than we are. That our Facebook friends have lovelier homes, nicer vacations, and children with lower propensities for tantrums and flinging the contents of their diapers than ours do.
There are times when social media exaggerates the pressure our culture puts on women to fit the elusive ideal of the Good Mother, to be nothing less than giddily over the moon with joy for parenting at every moment. I find a strange tension at times talking to other parents. We are willing to say that “parenting is hard,” but there is a reluctance to go beyond that. A fear that we can’t have it both ways—that mothering can’t bring tears from its beauty as well as from its frustrations. That by copping to one, we are eliminating the possibility of the other. It feels threatening to say, “There are times when motherhood makes me want to book a one-way ticket to Paris, alone.”
After a few days of a confused spirit, I finally snapped out of it. Of course I was coming up short; I was comparing the whole of my life to one selected sliver of another’s. It wasn’t doing me any good. I had to trust that what was best for another’s life wasn’t what’s best for mine. That my life was everything it should be, messy and complete, right now.
Nobody’s life is as perfect as it seems on Facebook. At times when I’ve posted my own idealized accounts, I suspect that deep down I was really trying to prove my happiness to myself. Ultimately, it never served me, and it didn’t serve others. When I start trying to prove how great my life is, I’m acting out of insecurity and feelings of inferiority. I’m acting out of the desire to keep up with others, which sometimes makes them, in turn, feel driven to keep up with me. It’s a vicious cycle.
I can stop it by remembering I am not served by any pretensions. My hope is not for Facebook to become the opposite extreme—a place to dump my every negative emotion or petty frustration. The truth is that all of us, every life, has highs and lows and is mostly comprised of the moments in between. As mothers, as women, as humans, we are only strengthened by remembering—and by helping others remember—that not a single one of us is in this alone. That we are all whole in our imperfections. That we have all dodged our share of dirty diapers and dreamed our share of tickets to France. What serves my spirit is remembering the truth: every life has its own unique difficulties and that mine, while imperfect, is beautiful. Beautiful maybe because of my imperfections.
Beautiful in my acceptance of them.
