Paling in the face of Palin
I’ve been thinking about Sarah Palin all week. Of course; what mom in America hasn’t been searching their souls?
I was dismayed by my initial reaction which was, hey, that woman has a four month old and FOUR other kids. Can she really give herself 24/7 to the job of Vice President? Who is taking care of her FIVE children?
My crusty old instinct as a mom was rearing its ugly head and I was shocked. I mean, I think mothers have a right to work! I am a liberated working mom myself!
But…. I guess when push comes to shove, I want to know who does what in the Palin household so I can feel comfortable with the idea of mommy not being available for a sick infant, for example. My kids were sick constantly when they were little. Who in Palin’s home deals with the 2:30 a.m. tylenol-dose, the 3:45 a. m. hot-steam shower treatment and the 7 a.m. call-in-sick-to-work drama?
Just tell me Dad does it, or a fantastic grandma/ aunt or someone who loves that child and those children as much as Palin does, then I feel OK.
After so much musing about my own surprisingly old-fashioned gut reaction, I decided that most mothers, me included, probably feel kind of threatened by Palin.
Why? Because we look at her and go pale. We see the uber-working-mom, the possible future VICE PRESIDENT, for God’s sake. She represents the potential that we are not able to live up to. Our standards are so high, and all we see in her is where we have failed. She represents what we all could be (should be–we ask ourselves?) if we were driven, ambitious, Type A, together, smart… bla, bla, bla, you get my drift.
We judge ourselves harshly in the light of everything she seems to achieve in any given day. We see her with her trim figure and pretty made-up face and think, damn, how come I can’t get the laundry done AND get to work on time? How come I wither at the idea of being on the PTA and meeting all my deadlines and shopping for food and taking the kids to their appointments and finding a new babysitter and researching camps and, and, and, and…
Are we jealous? Are we insecure? Why do modern moms feel we have to judge other mothers’ lives so harshly?
Because of how it makes us feel about how we run our own lives. Many of us have lost a sense of confidence about how WE want to do things, and spend too much time worrying about how we match up in comparison to others.
How do we solve this? To start, we have to:
- make peace with our own choices
- understand what we are good at…
- … and what we don’t do so well
- accept our inadequacies (we can’t say it often enough: no one is perfect!)
- make the most of our strengths
- judge how well we are doing by how happy our own family is, not by how others perceive us
- give ourselves credit for how hard we try
- quit judging ourselves or others so harshly
- know ourselves well enough to be able to set our own, authentic (achievable) goals
- live in the moment, and enjoy the small pleasures of our everyday lives
September 7th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I’m not jealous of Palin and I wouldn’t trade my little family set-up for all the responsibilities she has in a million years. But I think you are right about the fact that she somehow makes us feel inadequate: even though we don’t want her life, we feel we should be able to be supermoms just like she is. I’m tired of moms judging each other all the time. To each her own, I say!
September 10th, 2008 at 7:51 am
I like your list. It’s obvious stuff, but it’s good to be reminded every now and then of how changing the way we perceive ourselves can dramatically change the way we FEEL about our everyday.
September 12th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Looking over our shoulders all the time is what I find exhausting. We are our own worst critics. I wish women would feel pride about Palin’s accomplishments as a woman and a mother, not jealousy.