Right Mothering

Yesterday, in a posting to the Motherlode, Lisa Belkin expresses astonishment at the parental passing of judgment.

As I wrote in my first post, I do not shy away from judging parenting decisions.  In fact, I am perplexed by the political correctness-inspired moral relativism of so many who write about parenting.  The fact is, some parenting decisions are better than others.  And that not all parents do the right thing as parents.  How can we make such important decisions without judging between alternatives?  The problem rests not in the passing of judgment on parenting decisions, but the guilt of those who knowingly make the lesser decision and who take the proclamations of others in favor of the better decision – or sometimes merely the execution of these decisions – as a personal indictment.

When our daughter first began preschool, my husband and I missed the first parents’ potluck supper, because he did not yet have his driver’s license and I needed to stay home to nurse our daughter before bed.  I explained to a fellow parent that we don’t use babysitters.  I further explained that we both come from families in which babysitters were never employed and that we just weren’t comfortable leaving our daughter with one.  I was simply being honest, but my interlocutor took my explanation as an indictment of her decision to use babysitters, and she proceeded to attempt to shame me into finding one to use that evening.  I know that her aggressive behavior stemmed from her own parenting guilt.

Now, I sometimes have made decisions as a parent that are not the best for my daugther.  Last spring, I taught as a visiting assistant professor at a university in a south Atlantic state.  I came home every other weekend and entrusted the care of our daughter to my mother-in-law.  As I made this decision, I did not delude myself into thinking that it would not have negative consequences for my relationship with my daughter, although God-willing they would be short-term, nor that it wouldn’t have a negative effect on her psyche.  Mothers and fathers had one of two responses – the delusional ’she won’t even notice you are gone’ or the empathetic ‘i can’t imagine…’.  Personally, I resented the former and appreciated the latter.  Those who showed empathy with the difficulty of the situation were those parents who know that some parenting decisions are better than others, and I cherished that moment of empathy.  Many months later, my absence last spring is a distant memory, but I cannot pretend that it hasn’t left some sort of imprint on the psyche of our daughter.

Some parenting decisions are better than others, and we must simply be adult enough to live with our decisions without needing others to lie to us in order to make us feel better about them.