Why are we obsessed with judging?

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Good news! I don’t care what you think anymore.

I mean, of course I want you to like me. I’m still an insecure 14-year-old at heart hanging out at the edge of the cafeteria, hoping someone will invite me to sit down. That’s never going to change. But I don’t really care if you think I’m a good mom or not.

I’m interested in reading about the newest studies and discussing various parenting approaches, for sure. But it doesn’t bother me if you disagree with me. I won’t take it personally. I won’t think less of you. We can still be friends.

What a relief to finally be free from the tyranny of mom-on-mom judging. In case I was tempted to think it had disappeared altogether, though, a couple recent Facebook threads proved that holier-than-thou mothering is still going strong. Today’s Parent has a regular page called “The Debate” in which two parents argue opposing sides of a parenting issue. Keep in mind that Today’s Parent is brimming with well-researched, informative articles on all aspects of parenting. They have this one, opinion-based page which aims to be entertaining and to give some real-life perspective while exploring a divisive issue. I always enjoy reading it, so I was more than happy to argue for the con side of this month’s debate: Should your family use cloth diapers? BOOM.

The comments on the Today’s Parent Facebook page were riddled with defensive and snide remarks, mothers insulting one another over their diapering choices and, of course, criticizing my argument. I was mildly amused and shared the link on my personal Facebook page, noting that moms certainly have chips on their shoulders when it comes to diapering. What surprised me was how many people were really bothered, not only by the judgmental comments, but also by the fact that Today’s Parent frames these issues as debates in the first place.

Here’s what I think. It’s not the magazine’s fault. It’s not the internet or the media. It’s us. We’re the ones who make even the most benign decisions loaded with so much politics they deserve their own 24 hour cable news channel. We do it to ourselves; the media is just cashing in.

But why are we obsessed with judging and being judged? What is about motherhood? (Sounding off a gender-based stereotype alert here because the vast majority of dads that I know are completely oblivious or indifferent to the same issues that most mothers are wringing their hands over. There will, of course, be exceptions.)

We’re totally insecure, for one. Our judgement meters are especially sensitive in the first months of parenting when we’re doing our best to learn how to give our babies their best. We become gradually desensitized to other people’s opinions as our children grow older and we have more until, ultimately, we end up unfeeling husks of lunch-making, car pooling, laundry folding, multi-taskers who would rather spend that energy binge watching Orange is the New Black. But UNTIL THEN, we totally care.

I remember packing a diaper bag like it was going to be subject to a military inspection. Diapers? Check? Ointment? Check? Back up soother? Check? Spare onsie? No? WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU!? What kind, indeed. Did you have a natural childbirth as opposed to an epidural or a c-section? Did you breastfeed? For how long? Are your children vaccinated? Did you make your own baby food? All of these things weigh so heavily on us. And try as we might to do the right thing, there’s always someone else who’s doing it better. Damn, does she really make all her own baby clothes out of salvaged organic cotton offcuts? Bitch.

The stakes are so high, you see. These are our children, our babies. If we are bending over backwards, foregoing sleep, TV, books, magazines or even a career sometimes in order to do The Right Thing, then how dare someone come along and tell us it doesn’t matter? DUDE, I spent $600 on cloth diapers and then lovingly caressed my child’s shit out of those damn pieces of fabric while spending countless hours running up an insane hydro bill and you say IT DOESN’T MATTER. You say I shouldn’t have bothered?! I get that. I do. In fact, we are so invested in our choices being right that we often cannot for the life of us wrap our heads around the fact that they are not right for everybody. Or that there’s more than one right answer. Or that any given choice may conflict with another “right” choice.

And we’ve all done it too. As Dee Brun pointed out on my Facebook page, “We are all guilty of it at one time or another…If you say you haven’t you are lying and I WILL judge you.” Before we had kids, all the time, for sure, right? The mom ignoring her screaming kid in the grocery store? Wrong. The overweight kids at McDonalds? Wrong. The woman with the “SUV stroller” blocking the aisle at your favourite brunch spot? So wrong. But even after we become parents, it persists. The choices we make are the right ones and everything else is, if not wrong, definitely sub par.

What’s that line about how you can’t be paranoid if everyone is actually after you? Well, it’s like that. When you are a new mom, you really are the object of so much criticism that no wonder we get defensive. Postpartum hormones and a radical shift in self-identity don’t help us deal with it as gracefully as we might either.

The answer? God, I don’t know. I feel like you just have to outgrow it. It’s kind of like when I woke up one day at 18 years of age and realized I’d been a complete lunatic holding my parents emotionally hostage for the past two years. It suddenly dawned on me after my third baby that of course my values and priorities are different from other peoples. And of course that’s reflected in my parenting decisions. It’s not even that we disagree half the time. It’s about choosing our battles.

And the battle I’m definitely opting out of is the one we have with each other.