Getting over mom guilt and confronting mom-shaming
Getting over mom guilt and confronting mom-shaming
State of Postpartum Survey, Letting go of mom guilt, confronting mom-shamers, Feminist Advice Friday, and more
In this newsletter:
Some quick announcements
My experience with mom-shaming
A formula for getting past mom guilt
5 great ways to respond to mom shaming
A reason for hope if Roe v. Wade dies
Some quick announcements before anything else:
I’ll be making a small change to the schedule for this newsletter. Going forward, both the Liberating Mother newsletter (the one you’re currently reading, which includes Feminist Advice Friday), and the Feminist Advice Friday-only newsletter will go out Thursday afternoon. This means subscribers will get access to Feminist Advice Friday a day before it goes live on Facebook, Instagram, or anywhere else. Everything else about the newsletter—including the two free newsletters and two paid newsletters per month—should remain the same.
However, I’ll be rolling out some new content for paid subscribers in the coming weeks—a tool for assessing how bad inequality in your house is, some conversation starters for managing inequality, and some warning signs early in a relationship, to name a few. I’ll give lots of advanced warning so you can subscribe without missing it.
Finally, a reminder that the State of Marriage survey results are now available to free subscribers, AND I’m opening another survey. Next, I’m moving on to collecting data about the postpartum experience. Please consider taking the State of Postpartum survey. I’ll release the data here first, in about a month!
Onward…
I still remember the first time someone ever mom-shamed me: My oldest was a few days old, and I posted a photo of her playing with one of those plastic toy mirrors that comes with every baby play gym ever.
I’m sure you’re horrified. What kind of monster am I, amirite?
Well, someone thought I was. A distant cousin took this as his cue to initiate a multi-paragraph rant about vain women and their poor understanding of child development. “She can’t even recognize her reflection this young—something YOU WOMEN would know if you spent a little less time looking in the mirror.”
It was bizarre. I shrugged it off as the rantings of a lunatic. But still, it lingered in my consciousness because five years later, I still remember it. It checked all the boxes of mom-shaming: implying that mothers are so stupid that someone else understands their child’s needs better than they possibly could; insinuating that a failure to agree with the mom-shamer is proof of the mom’s stupidity; vague, sweeping generalizations about women.
Mom-shaming is designed to make us question ourselves, even when we recognize that the actual content of the shaming is unhinged. Sure, my cousin was overreacting to a completely neutral parenting decision. But maybe I had done something to indicate that I’m vain, shallow, that I don’t understand child development. I could discount his barb, while still wondering whether it hinted at something wrong with me.
That’s the paradox of mom shaming: We can recognize that people engage in this practice because something is wrong with them, while still wondering if these people—these people who are doing something objectively sexist and foolish, these people who have discounted the rules of polite society in favor of a misogynist attack—are actually right.