Paddling Furiously Beneath the Surface

People don't frown in photos. In photos, everything is hunky dory. Mothers are the same with our out-of-the-house faces. We are experts at putting on a brave public face even when chaos and frustration reign at home.

Do you ever look at another mother gliding along, calmly pushing a pram, and wonder how she manages to be so competent, so together? I read an explanation for this (was it in What Mothers Do? I'm not sure) and it went roughly as follows. We all feel such a sense of relief when we manage to get organised enough to leave the house that we are bound to look a bit calm and happy as we walk along. Let's face it, the afternoon stroll is the highight of the day when you're caring for a newborn and you're pretty pleased with yourself for getting your shit together long enough to step outside the door (plus the fact that this may be the first time in the day that the baby has stopped crying). At the same time as you're looking at some other mother and wondering how she manages to be so organised, she is probably looking at you thinking how confident you are.

Our own mothers can be just as unhelpful when it comes to understanding how bloody hard motherhood can be. I have already forgotten just how bewildering the first few months were (I don't think I got enough sleep to actually form memories). If I've forgotten after a year, imagine what it's like after 30 years. They remember the good bits (the human brain does have a tendency to forget bad things anyway) and it is the good bits that they tend to talk about. Hence, insecure new mums like me wonder why we are so much less competent than our mothers were.

I think blogs also tend to give a false impression of how great other people's lives are. You read about what a wonderful day some blogger and her family had, you see pictures of attractive children kicking up autumn leaves in dappled sunlight, and you think, "How come my life isn't as perfect as that?". But what the blogger doesn't write about is the tantrum the child had at breakfast time; the fact she had to be bribed to put on her wellies; the way she cried when she was put in her car seat. I'm not criticising anyone for writing nice things about their families; I am just saying that we naturally tend to edit out the worst bits and write about the things that went well, that we enjoyed.

The point of this post is to say that intelligent, self-aware people tend to be self-critical and, when comparing themselves with others, to find themselves wanting (at least, I do). Mothers are no exception. We always think everyone else is coping so much better then we are (I do anyway). But I have met enough mums in real life to know that when you scratch the surface and get past that public face, we all have the same worries and problems. Even a confident, capable, charity-working, volunteering, supermum-of-three, long the subject of my admiration, admitted to me yesterday that she feels she can't cope when her toddler plays up. I know that shouldn't make me feel better, but it does.

So what I am trying to say is that it is easy to look at other people and imagine that their lives are more enjoyable than your own, or that they are much better parents than you, or they are happier than you, or whatever other metric you use to measure your own self-worth. But I don't think it's true. I think other people look at you and think exactly the same thing. I think mothers in particular are brilliant at putting on a brave face. In reality, we all appear to be gliding serenely while beneath the surface we are paddling furiously. This is the nature of things and it will never change. So (and I am saying this more to myself than to anyone else) chill out, make the best of things and stop thinking that everyone is so much better at motherhood than you.