{"id":5944,"date":"2017-10-13T00:02:14","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T06:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.mops.org\/?p=5944"},"modified":"2017-10-13T00:02:14","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T06:02:14","slug":"love-speaks-the-loudest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/love-speaks-the-loudest\/","title":{"rendered":"Love Speaks the Loudest"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not sure when motherhood began to resemble a game show entitled\u00a0\u201cJudgment and Comparison.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll take, \u2018Why is your 3-year-old not potty-trained?\u2019 for $100, Alex.\u201d Somewhere along the way, I feel like moms have developed the tendency to forget that we\u2019re all on the same team with the same goal: to raise productive members of society who can wipe themselves and won\u2019t live in our basements as adults.<\/p>\n

When I was wheeled out of the hospital with my baby girl in my arms almost 14 years ago, I remember thinking, Do I know how to be a good mom? Do they realize they are letting this tiny person leave the hospital with someone who only makes her bed when she\u2019s leaving on vacation? I had no idea what I was doing, but I had skimmed enough parenting books and hoped they would help me figure out feeding schedules and how to cut teeny tiny, razor sharp baby fingernails. These were the days before Instagram and Pinterest, so I was blissfully unaware that I was supposed to be documenting every single moment with chalkboard calligraphy reading: \u201cBaby\u2019s First Bath.\u201d I just rocked her, fed her, swaddled her and did my best to keep her alive while maintaining my sanity through sleepless nights.<\/p>\n

Then an interesting thing happened, I began to socialize with other moms. We\u2019d meet at the pool, a play group or just push our babies in strollers around the neighborhood. I began to see all the different ways women choose to mother. Some of them let their babies sleep in bed with them, some had already enrolled their toddlers in Spanish classes, and some made their own baby food. I did none of these things. The only way I got dinner on the table for two years was courtesy of \u201cBaby Einstein\u201d videos and\u00a0 400 viewings of \u201cFinding Nemo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Between Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, we can kill ourselves with\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cshould haves.\u201d We are a generation who has never worked harder at our parenting, yet feel more guilt over all the ways we aren\u2019t enough because we bombard ourselves with constant comparison. Comparisons can consume us, and in an attempt to make ourselves feel better, we can become hypercritical of the ways other women choose to mother their children. We lose sight of the fact that we are all doing the hard things and keeping helpless humans alive. We let our insecurities take over. We all know the mom who makes homemade birthday cakes while you don\u2019t even know how to work your oven, or the mom who stays home with her kids while you actually enjoy going to the office every morning. It\u2019s when we stop comparing that we can fully support each other. We can stop judging the moms who choose home-school over public school, or carrot sticks over chicken nuggets, and realize that we are all doing what we believe is best for our kids. Motherhood has never been a one-size-fits-all proposition. There is no one right way to raise good kids.<\/p>\n

As important as it is for us to give our kids grace, we need to give ourselves and our fellow moms grace as well. Don\u2019t look around and convince yourself everyone else is doing it better or that everyone else is doing it wrong. We all have days that are Instagram-worthy because we drank hot chocolate and played a board game with our kids, and days with PMS and a dog that just threw up all over the rug. Motherhood is a minute-by-minute adventure. How great it would be if we all cheered each other on with love and support instead of criticism and judgment, recognizing that one mom\u2019s parenting style doesn\u2019t diminish yours.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always believed that criticism and judgment are born out of our own insecurities, a need to critique what someone else is doing to validate our own choices. When we begin to believe that we are the mother God meant for our kids to have, we can do a better job of encouraging and loving fellow moms. Maybe your kids don\u2019t need cauliflower carved to look like a poodle, or a Twinkie\u00ae made to look like a Minion, but another kid does. We need to quit believing the lie that there is one right way to make our kids\u2019 childhood magical and wonderful. Because childhood is pretty magical all by itself, and it looks different across family lines.<\/p>\n

What happens when we begin to live in a way where we quit building walls around ourselves and let others see who we really are and, in turn, they feel safe enough to let us see who they really are? To see where they are hurting. To listen and not judge as they share their fears and struggles about raising broken kids in a broken world. Life becomes richer when we lead with love, because love is the building block to real community, deep relationships and better moms. Maybe you don\u2019t know how to carve a lightsaber out of celery, but you have a mom friend who\u2019s happy to do it for you because that\u2019s her specialty.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Melanie Shankle is the author of Church of the Small Things <\/em>and the founder of The Big Mama Blog<\/em>. She is a New York Times<\/em> bestselling author of three books including Nobody\u2019s Cuter than You<\/em>. Melanie is a graduate of Texas A&M and lives in San Antonio, Texas with her daughter, Caroline, husband, Perry, and two wild dogs Piper and Mabel.<\/p>\n

\n

This article currently appears in the\u00a0fall 2017 issue of\u00a0The MOPS Magazine<\/em>. If you didn\u2019t get a copy and would like your own, you can\u00a0subscribe<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>to get\u00a0The MOPS Magazine\u00a0<\/em>in your mailbox every \"\"<\/a>season. If you subscribe, forward your receipt to\u00a0magazines@mops.org<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and we\u2019ll shoot a copy of the current issue in the mail to you for free \u2026 just because we like you.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not sure when motherhood began to resemble a game show entitled\u00a0\u201cJudgment and Comparison.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll take, \u2018Why is your 3-year-old not potty-trained?\u2019 for $100, Alex.\u201d Somewhere along the way, I feel like moms have developed the tendency to forget that we\u2019re all on the same team with the same goal: to raise productive members of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":261,"featured_media":5946,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,42,102],"tags":[675,32,373,1281,87,330,54,55,56],"class_list":["post-5944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faith","category-lifestyle","category-relationships","tag-friends","tag-friendship","tag-grace","tag-judgment","tag-love","tag-magazine","tag-mama","tag-mom","tag-motherhood"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}