There’s a wonderfully warm wise Welsh woman I know. Her early years were spent on a bicycle practising midwifery in London in the 1960s, yes, like an ACTUAL cast member of “Call the Midwife” (which, incidentally, she reports is true to life). Her recent years have been hard: nursing her husband in his final days, experiencing lockdown as a single person. Yet she is exceptionally good at taking an interest in everyone else’s lives, perhaps especially the mummy gang at church, and she speaks encouragement and sympathy into our situations. It’s obvious she must have been an amazing midwife.
One time she observed to me (you’ll have to imagine the Welsh accent, I can’t reproduce it phonetically): “The challenge for you young girls” (I’ll take that!) “is that you’ve all had babies together and now you’ve got to try not to COMPARE with each other.”
Goodness, how right she is! And how impossible I find it NOT to compare myself with the other mums, whose children are better behaved, more developed, sleep well, and whose approaches to parenting are more relaxed, more assured, more efficient, more biblical even.
Since having children I’ve worked part-time. Some might call that the best of both worlds. I call it a position ripe for observing greener grass on both sides.
On the one hand, there are my stay at home mum friends. Some of them home school. They are supportive of their husbands, give time to worthy causes, they are great hostesses. On the other side, there are my friends and colleagues who somehow balance parenting with ‘proper’ working. They progress in their careers, juggle responsibilities admirably, whilst I stagnate as 'just' a classroom teacher – gone are the days I volunteer for stuff, organise things, lead meetings and presentations. Instead, every work morning I do the walk of shame past the senior teachers who catch the latecomers at the front of school; every afternoon I dash off, keen to collect the boys as quickly as possible.
There was recently a promotion position available at my school, advertised as full time. This sent me into a flurry of introspection: would I ever be in a position where I felt it might work for our family for me to be full time again, and if not, then was I resigning myself to a life of further stagnation career-wise?
“Just the day before yesterday it was universally accepted that mums wouldn’t even have paid work,” reassured one friend, “You don’t need to put pressure on yourself.”
My mum was a full time working single parent for much of my childhood; I can now look back and appreciate what an incredible feat this was.
“I’d swap my life for your one right now,” another friend told me yesterday, who has a particularly impressive role in education. “I feel despicable that my son is that last one at the after school club, crying when I pick him up.” But she and her husband juggle two full-time leadership roles and haven’t even resorted to a robot vacuum cleaner.
Comparing, comparing, comparing.
I mused on this to a friend who helpfully lent me a book. She confessed that even as she was reading it, she was comparing herself to the case studies in it: “Well, I’m not as bad at comparing as she is!” Well, unfortunately I probably am.
I’d recommend the book. It’s short and it reminds us that comparing makes us miserable and that we have an identity not based in what we do but in who we are: loved children of God.
Yes, great, I think. So God loves us all unconditionally regardless. But what about me being specially me? I want affirmation in my particular roles.
Ah ha! Paul writes to encourage the Ephesian church: “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”
I am God’s handiwork. I am made new in Jesus. And God has good works for me to do, which might not be the same as the good works that other amazing mums around me are doing, but their works are not my works and that’s ok.
I think my Welsh friend would be proud of me for saying that.
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