I thought I’d already met Supermom this winter, at the indoor romper-room downtown.  I was grappling with my toddler when a young, soft-spoken brunette appeared– trailing 4 kids all under age five.  With infinite grace, she herded her brood out of their snowsuits, played trains, read books, settled disputes and offered wholesome snacks, all while breastfeeding her cooing baby. 

A practiced voyeur, I kept one eye on my child and the other on this angel.  I overheard her say she homeschooled and grew her family’s food in an organic garden.  “Since having the 4th, I’ve had to stop baking bread from scratch,” she remarked.  Baking projects with kids have always put me in a state of anxiety.  This woman was more patient with her four than I am with my two.  Immediately I turned my well-honed laser beam of judgment in on myself, illuminating my maternal failings.

 Although we may profess solidarity, mothers judge each other incessantly.  Either a mother doesn’t breastfeed or she’s still nursing her four-year-old.  Either she works full-time, neglecting her children at day-care, or she smothers them by staying home.  Either she traumatizes her babies by cold-heartedly “Ferberizing”, or she compromises her marriage through years of co-sleeping.  Either she vaccinates them, risking autism, or she doesn’t vaccinate and risks exposing the entire preschool to Pertussis.  Whatever we do, we can’t win, and we don’t cut each other much slack.

There’s a Native American saying:  ”Do not judge another man until you have walked many moons in his moccasins.”  I remember these words when I find myself idealizing or disparaging other mothers.  Whether we judge celebrity scapegoats like Octo-mom and Britney Spears or our friends and neighbors, we never know the back-story of another’s life.  During my first pregnancy, I learned that someone in my Hypno-birthing class had ended up with an unplanned C-section.  “I guess she didn’t practice enough,” I remember thinking, a naïve equation that was painfully disproved later at my own emergency Cesarean. 

But snap judgments come second nature to women.  I’ve been primed to pigeon-hole other females since 6th grade, when I wrote SLAM books with my friends at sleepovers.  FACE… HAIR… BODY… PERSONALITY…  Ruthlessly we filled out the categories for each girl, driven by our own insecurities.  Our party favors were folded squares of paper printed in block letters, detailing our flaws and successes. 

In Junior High we appraised each other’s changing bodies, both envious and scornful of the voluptuous Audrey Darling, who busted out of her pink bikini at the class picnic.   From my Honors Class vantage point, I regarded the Smokers as another breed– those girls who lit up in the bathrooms between classes, wearing dark eyeliner, skin-tight leggings and hair-sprayed heavy-metal manes.  They reclined on the radiators with their high-heeled slouch boots, talking about sex. 

They owned the Girls’ Room, and I was terrified to pee in school.  They were the Sluts, we were the Nerds, though by senior year I’d crossed over into secretly slutty behavior myself and made tentative friends with a smoker named Sheri Morrison, who played guitar and wrote graphic lyric poetry.

None of the high school labels were entirely true, and they still aren’t.  The seemingly put-together, patient mother has her own dark side.  The angry mom barking at her kids may be burdened by unimaginable stress.  Yet judging is our first instinct–  not open-mindedness or compassion.  The harsher we judge ourselves, the harsher we judge others.  Meditation teacher Sally Kempton says that the faults we denounce in other people are usually our own negativities projected outward.  Judgment arises from the ego, and its negative emotions can be toxic. 

Ayelet Waldman, mother of 4 and novelist from California, recently published a book called Bad Mother, which reveals her own parenting mishaps and condemns the “Good Mother” myth descended from June Cleaver.  Waldman went on Oprah and was booed by an enraged audience for proclaiming that she loves her husband more than her kids.  I may not share Waldman’s sentiments, but I commend her bravery.  Still there’s a visceral part of me that hisses, “For shame! How could she?”

Women tend to boo each other more than they cheer.  I thought I’d already met Supermom this winter, but I was wrong.  I was recently at the hairdresser’s with my girls when the waiting room filled with children.  A striking blonde woman emerged from their midst and greeted her stylist.  I began to count.  1, 2, 3 boys.  1, 2, 3 girls.  This serene woman had six children, all of them calm and obedient, sitting quietly while Mom got her hair done.  Before I could inquire about their ages, my 2-year-old started clearing beauty products from the shelves and we had to leave.

Somehow she lessened me, this mother of six– a complete stranger about whom I knew nothing.  I’d witnessed a single moment of parenting grace and become inferior.  I always assumed I’d have a passel of kids, and now here I am with my two, barely keeping my head above water.  “It’s Karma,” said my husband sagely.  “Some people were meant to have many children in this lifetime.” 

So can I applaud the Supermoms and their broods of adorable, polite kids? Can I stop romanticizing or criticizing the other mothers I see?  If we all channeled our judging energy into other activities, imagine what we might be able to accomplish.

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