She’s Probably Not Doing That *AT* You

Linking up with This Ain't the Lyceum for 7 Quick Takes.

1

If you somehow haven’t heard by now, the third royal baby was born! Yea babies! We got our first picture of Kate stepping out of the hospital with babe in arms.

And the internet went “OMG SHE’S WEARING HEELS?!” Cue memes about how real women postpartum. You know, not LIKE THAT.

Lots of people shared it. They probably felt good about themselves, they represent “real women”.

This seems amazingly hypocritical.

The same people who talk about how we need to be open to others, and everyone needs to do what works for them (“Do what you gotta do.”), made a meme to make fun of a woman doing what she has to do!

So empowering y’all.

2

“We’re not being mean, we’re just saying our experience wasn’t like that.”

Ok.

What about women who DO have experiences like that?

3

“We just want to point out that women shouldn’t hold themselves up to unreasonable expectations.”

Who gets to decide what is reasonable? Why can women not be trusted to discern a reasonable that might be different from your own? Is anyone seriously watching what a royal does and think “oh man, I wish I could be doing that too!” without also realizing the drastic difference between her day to day and that of a British royal?

4

The message seems to come down to “don’t let us know if you are doing well”.

Let’s say 90% of your day was struggle. The baby was colicky, plans fell through, you’re achy, everyone in whining. But you managed to eat a good meal and get dressed today. Why should the focus go to primarily the struggle and not the success? Don’t we tell women to focus on the positive?
For that matter, why does Kate not count as a success when she used the help and resources she has? Last I checked we wanted to encourage women to use their resources.

5

It gets creepy.

You know what posts do the best on social media? The ones about what is going wrong in my life. The ones about darkness. The ones that show me at my worst.

At some point it feels like people are scrolling through looking for someone doing worse than themselves so they can feel better about their own lives.

Even if that works for you, it’s a little messed up to need someone else to be doing badly so you can feel better.

6

I don’t think the problem is unrealistic expectations anymore. I think we have a problem, especially among women, with needing to be the same. Policing that sameness and displacing anyone different into a box of “other”. 

I’m one of those “others” most of the time. I don’t experience many things in what seems to be the manner of the majority. 

I don’t get morning sickness, I do well under pressure, I like to have a tidy home (or at least 20 minutes from clean) most of the time. I am almost always on time or early, and it does not make sense to my brain that people might not mean what they say.

7

I’m not unobservant. I notice that my being like this can make people uncomfortable. There are a lot of assumptions about what I “must think” without anyone taking the time to ask me.

I don’t care if your house is messy, I truly didn’t notice. It’s not my stuff - it doesn’t bother me.

I can empathize with you when you have hard pregnancies even if I haven’t experienced that.

I understand that my experience might not be everyone’s experience.

But I want to be allowed the social space to share my good!

Is not the point of having community not to glorify the good and support each other? I think we can do that without putting other women into a box marked “not one of us”.

Why I Don't Call Myself a "Natural" Mom and Other Thoughts on Labels

There's a particular aspect of mom culture, and among women in general, that has bothered me for a long time. I'll call it over-identification with an external. I see it in the leagues of "natural moms" who band together over their shared choices....until someone makes a different choice.
Are you still a "natural mom" if you can't/don't breastfeed?
If you don't have a super strict diet?
If you had a c-section?
Everyone seems to have their own, differing, definition of what makes a "natural mom" and thus social inclusion becomes a roving target. At any moment you might slip and become not "natural" enough. What then? Are you out of the "natural mom" club?

I'm picking on the "natural mom" label first because it is probably one of the most egregious examples, but I see this among other groups of women too. There's the marrieds, the singles, the married with kids, etc. In our quest to find people who share our experience, we have all managed to create our own little sparsely populated boxes.

What happens next?

We take to the internet to complain about how lonely and isolated we are.
After that.
We complain about how the internet, and social media, is making the problem worse.

Y'all, the internet didn't make this problem. Plenty of people felt isolation before social media. What social media did do was provide another avenue to do what we were doing before - over-identifying with externals that ultimately say nothing about who we ARE.

All those labels? They are all about what we do, what we think about ourselves, but not who we ARE.

Homeschooling might be a big part of my day to day, but my soul does not have a mark on it that says "homeschooler". No matter how many labels you collect to try and name for your own personal constellation of attributes, those labels tell me nothing about YOU. They might tell me how you spend your time, but we are all more than our day jobs.

There is a notable exception! My label of "baptized Catholic" does say something about who I am. Baptism left an indelible mark on my soul, and I couldn't deny it or get rid of it even if I wanted to. Being a baptized Catholic is now an enduring part of my being, and it makes sense to convey that identity.
I can't fail to be Catholic now. I can fail to fulfill my duties as a Catholic, I can dislike Catholicism, but I cannot unCatholic myself. That's a safe identity.

While I appreciate the yearning to share commonalities with others, I wish I saw less of a use of those commonalities to triage who is enough like ourselves to be worthy of our social energy.
The fact is that I am doing all of those externals just for a time. What happens when that external ceases to make sense in my life? Do I then become too different to be close to those with whom I used to share a label?

Over-identifying with an external means that our identities, our concept of ourselves, are only safe as long as we keep doing things the "right" way. It often means going with the crowd for the sake of relationship. That sounds like an exhausting way to live!

Lately I've been consciously avoiding calling myself by a label. When I meet someone I try not to immediately list out my marital status, number of kids, diet, schooling choices, etc. Instead I focus on having an organic conversation. And it has been HARD! You don't notice what a bad habit triage by label has become until you try to consciously shift your own interactions.

It has been a worthy experiment, and one I recommend. Perhaps there are labels that you would be better off letting go. Perhaps there's a person you have seen around, but never gotten to know because y'all didn't seem to have a lot in common. Give her a chance to be more than your perception of her.

What are your thoughts on labels? Do you agree that social media didn't create the storm? Have you ever clung to a label for the sake of belonging?