I am the oldest kid in my family.
Growing up, it meant that I spent a fair amount of time hanging around adults. On purpose, in fact.
Their conversations were waaaay more interesting.
And I managed to learn a lot of things that way...as I tried to remain as invisible as possible.
(This is easy for a kid to do when adults are hanging with their friends...you get forgotten about pretty quick in that scenario. Well...until the conversation started tip-toeing into more 'mature' topics and all-of-the-sudden furtive grown-up eyes reveal
you! a too-young-for-this eavesdropper who ends up getting so
unfairly shooed from the room to go get ready for bed or something. As you can tell, some leftover indignation still remains...)
Anyways.
One of the things I learned from my under-the-age-of-majority-observations of adults was this:
Homemakers apparently
loved to compare themselves to each other.
And then they loved to feel bad about it. Or feel pretty good about themselves (which was usually terribly hidden) when they encountered a situation where they just
knew they were doing better than so-and-so.
That's the way it appeared to me, anyways. Just a kid, who thought adults were fascinatingly
weird.
Now that I
am a homemaker, I understand the feeling a little better, and would not begin to describe it so tritely now. It still fascinates me, though. And scares me a little at the same time. Because I find it far more difficult to resist than I had once thought. It's starting to set in!
Aaaaaaaaargh!
But really. I have seen (and continue to see) that dark habit--so easy to acquire--do some pretty destructive stuff to homemakers' sense of self-worth. I hate that. I don't want to perpetuate it. And I don't want to suffer from it.
THAT, of course, is far easier said than done. As is any goal where
perfection is the standard of success.
And I've often wondered
why the tendency to compare. I can only think about it from where I'm coming from...although I'll use 'we' just so that I don't feel so isolated in my disclosure...ha. :)
...Go-go Self Reflection:
I think it maybe has to do with feedback. Because homemaking is such a vitally important and rewarding job, it comes with a lot of hurdles ("opposition in all things").
One of those hurdles can be loneliness, for one, resulting from a fairly segregated work locale (read: your own home, not an office where everyone congregates at the water cooler). If you don't make the effort to connect with others in a real and meaningful way, your house can feel like four walls keeping you in...instead of four walls inviting others to join you, a haven.
And so I find that without monthly reviews, tests and graded papers, a yearly evaluation of your effort, or any other such mode of measurement, there's not really a whole lot of instantly-gratifying ways to know that you're doing a good job. The easiest and most artificial way of finding out seems to be by comparing what we're doing to what other moms are doing. At least that way we've got an instant rating scale...if other moms are doing it, then we should be, too...right?
(Never mind taking into account different families, different situations, different women, different opinions...not to mention that all you usually ever see of others is their
game-face: their house cleaned for company, their kids groomed for public appearance, and politely disguised marital 'milk-spills', if you will. Which is all fine to do, I think. In fact, it's usually out of respect for our company that we present our best. But when it becomes about
convincing other people....about who-knows-what, maybe that things are
always this fantastic....then I think it's a different story altogether).
I often need to remind myself that comparing is the easy way out.
It keeps me from thinking deeply about what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and who I really should be trying to impress. That's harder to discern. It takes more effort. And it's harder to be truthful about. Especially when just looking to the mom-next-door is so rewarding to our egos...whether it be satisfying our belief that we're doing great (in comparison to...what?) or stroking our self-pitying tendencies. Both of which I believe are ego-induced.
I'm finding that I'm in a
constant battle with myself to seek approval from the right source (read: my Father in Heaven).
And to be fair to moms everywhere, I think that the tendency to compare is not just a homemaker's plague. But I do think that there's more potential for harm in a homemaker's, in a mom's, life as a result of not seeking our self-confidence from the right place inside.
And I think that's because what we're doing is so SO important.
It makes sense to me that the job with the highest stakes is the one that can be most affected by losing sight of what's really important.
I want to be humble enough to learn from other moms: to enjoy theirs and my own successes with my whole heart, not just the part I can spare because the other half of my heart is drowning in secret
woe-is-me's.
If I can do anything to keep from living like
that, then I'm gonna do it.
During the past few days a few full-time homemakers who I really respect have posted pictures of the rooms of their houses on their blogs in true-to-living form: strewn toys, clothes on beds, unfolded laundry.
How beautiful.
How honest.
Oh, how I love it.
