Lately I’ve been having conversations with a bunch of folks interested in jumping into the social media + blogging fray. Some are personal friends, and others I met through my presentation at Milwaukee’s Job Camp.
The thing about sharing your life + thoughts online is that you have to be ready for the push back. You have to be ready for the accusations that will inevitably come from an anonymous commenter – the person who judges every inane action and proclaims to the world that you’re a bad mother.
I say this because I’ve experienced it many, many times. So I’m here to say it gets easier. But it remains part of the gig.
Blogging has been an incredible outlet and I’m always enthusiastic about seeing new & creative folks join in but one thing I rarely mention is that at times, this whole social media thing can be very painful.
YouTube is a particularly harsh audience and putting my body + weight on display has allowed for an endless stream of comments like “you may have lost the weight, but you’re still fugly”. The drivel of internet troll hate usually makes me laugh – it doesn’t affect my self-esteem, and if anything, it’s given me a chance to fine-tune clever comebacks that showcase their jackassery.
I thought I had developed a thick skin, until baby Jude came along.
Then I realized the worst comments were yet to come, and they would arrive from among my peers… from women, and moms… comments about my parenting. They’d be related to choices like putting my son on the internet, opting not to have him circumcised, trying for a home birth, and taking him to oh-so-dangerous places in the world.
“You’re a bad mother” is what some have said. And I’d be lying if I claimed those words didn’t hurt. They’d finally found my Achilles heel and managed to penetrate through to stab me in the heart.
The good news? I’m learning to let it go. To agree to disagree. To be kinder and less judgmental when I see other moms yelling at their kids in the grocery store because maybe that’s not an accurate or complete picture of her mothering skills.
So this past week when I was at the Mom 2.0 Summit and there was a panel made up of three brilliant women I admire and the topic was self-proclaimed bad mothering – I knew I had to attend.
While they also talked about marketing issues and working with brands, I edited together pieces where they shared their personal journey:
42 Responses to “Bad mothers”
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Twitter: EstherCrawford
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May 9th, 2011 at 7:56 am
[via YouTube] It is not a salad, or a bad decision at a fast food restaurant of one day without much consequence. All a child needs emotionally, morally, spiritually,culturally is multiply a million times by the amount of physical items is needed: Car seat, high chair, diaper change table etc etc etc. More emphasis should be given to girls in highschool about it, and then we’ll have less 16 & pregnant episodes, also parents who can’t support their kids emotionally and economically should abstain or go to jail
May 9th, 2011 at 7:52 am
[via YouTube] The worst part of motherhood, is never the kids, or how the kids stress you out, is the little support, or the lot of aggravation you get from the one, or ones that are expected to help you, not in vain the saying goes “it takes a village to raise a kid”, it is not a job for one, specially in this DNA era. Now when a mother is not raped, unsupported and continues to have child after child, she is not a bad mother, she is a “terribly irresponsable human being”, Having a child is not a light thing