In I Only Knew Her Peanut-Butter-Lovin’ Son From Fliers Taped On Storefronts  Julie Jo Severson writes about a time when as a student journalist, she interviewed the mother of a boy who was abducted by a gunman, never to return. Twenty-five years on, Julie Jo is a mother and, in her own words: “at times, I ‘overparent,’ hovering over my kids more than I should.” She goes on to say that this isn’t about making sure they do their homework to get into university. “It’s about keeping them safe so they come back home.”

Reading this helped me put into words something I couldn’t quite articulate about how insane it is to judge another person’s parenting style.

Imagine your life as a tapestry, each thread building the cloth of your life. At first, it is just a mix of colours. As more threads are woven in, a picture emerges. Each thread is essential for that completed picture to look the way it does. If I had exactly the same life you do, our tapestries would look the same. But, we didn’t have the same experiences. Even my sisters had different experiences to mine, so our memories and responses to life are different. Each tapestry is unique.

Into Julie Jo’s tapestry are woven the threads of a conversation with a grieving mother, a moment in time reverberating through the years and touching on how she parents now.We all have those moments. We look at our children and we see our own past and imagine it will be their future. We feel fear for them.

I’ve been aware for a long time that children mimic their parents and that I must therefore have mimicked my mother, learned to worry in the way she did, learned even that worrying was love. There are different ways to be aware. We can notice behaviour and judge ourselves or another person for it. We can be neutral in our awareness. Or, we can be loving. I remember a friend saying that she indulged her son’s little neuroses, but had less patience with her daughter’s. Why? Because, she said, her daughter’s were her own. Most people aren’t so clear that what they dislike in others is what they dislike in themselves. Mostly they suppress or deny it instead.

For a long time, I tried to be different from my mother. I fought against the anxieties I’d identified in myself that I’d also seen in her. I tried to ignore or rise above them. I was far from neutral, far from loving – towards both of us.

Even as a child, I knew my mother had a brother who died young, but he seemed remote and in some ways the story of this uncle we never had seemed exciting, something from a storybook. One day it dawned on me that my mother must have grieved for him and that he had died only five years before my older sister was born. I realised the hole he left in my mother’s life was never  filled. I began to understand her in a way I hadn’t before.

“Mommy wars” are wars with our own mothers and with ourselves as much as they are with anyone else. What we see, what we judge, is an invention of our own mind, a view of someone else created by the tapestry of our life’s experiences.

Mommy wars are wars with ourselves as much as with anyone else.Tweet

We don’t see a full picture. Even if we know the circumstances of a person’s life, we don’t know the minute details that colour their emotional experiences. We can’t see into the back of the tapestry to discover where the knots are tied or where threads hang loose. We have no idea if pulling on a loose thread might undo one stitch or unravel the whole tapestry. In wanting to prove that our way is best, we totally miss that, and so we miss the chance to hold our painful past in loving awareness and let it heal.

My daughters used to swim a lot, so I spent many hours with other parents sitting on poolside. Once, when they were small, a mother told me how lucky I was to have girls. “He never does what I ask,” she said of her son. “Boys don’t listen.” She went on to list her evidence, and much of the behaviour she described was similar to my younger daughter’s. I said this, and the mother continued to tell me how hard it was to raise sons and how lucky I was. “Boys don’t listen,” she said again.

I leapt straight to judgment, making the same assumption that many of you will have made just now: your son doesn’t listen because you don’t.

Judgment is easy, but it doesn’t help the other parent change and it doesn’t help us either. It creates separation, and separation creates stress.

In explaining that my daughter did what her son did, I tried to show the mother an error in her thinking. I saw her attitude as a problem, and tried to get her to change. My words were subtle, but my intention wasn’t, and our intentions often speak far louder than our words. Besides, this mother was already feeling out of her depth. She probably didn’t even hear much of what I said. She certainly wasn’t able to think clearly. It’s mostly futile to give information to someone who is in a state of panic – first they need support.

The most effective way I know to do that is to feel love for the person exactly as they are. They will sense acceptance and grow calmer.

But we aren’t always able to tap into that level of unconditional love – we may feel tense ourselves, our minds aren’t clear, our emotions on edge.

In that circumstance, which is how most of us are much of the time, in my experience, a couple of things can help. The first is to be aware of what’s going on inside you – the thoughts and emotions, the body tension. Just being aware of this, without judging it, helps you calm, and so makes you more able to listen to another person instead of leaping in to fix a problem.

The second thing that helps is awareness of what might be going on inside the other person. Of course you’re not them, you can’t know for sure, but most of us have similar feelings and desires, and it’s worth a go. This is, of course, empathy. There’s a tendency to think empathy can deplete us, that it’s an act of giving that is endless, a bottomless pit. To be honest, there are times it has felt like to me. That’s because in those times, I forgot to include myself in the empathy. Empathy for ourselves is just as important as empathy for someone else.

Empathy for ourselves is just as important as empathy for someone else.Tweet

It helps to think of empathy as something that can be learned and developed. I considered myself an empathetic person, but as we’ve seen in the encounter above, my empathy was conditional. I empathised with the woman’s son, but not with her. I took sides. Empathy doesn’t.

Year later, I was at another poolside, with another mother. This one had no problem with having sons. In fact, she preferred boys to girls. But she wasn’t happy with the swim team’s coach and spent several minutes complaining about him. Then she complained about her son’s school, and how she’d had to visit with teachers to sort things out.

My initial reaction was judgmental – I liked the coach and felt a desire to defend him. I also knew that wasn’t likely to change her mind, and that the hour we spent together might be tense. Not long before this, I had been on a training course in NVC, a process that teaches empathy skills. (I don’t wholeheartedly recommend NVC because of its cumbersomeness, but can be a useful tool.)

Empathy doesn’t just recognise a person’s emotions. It also recognises what matters to them. I thought about what this mother had said, and considered what felt important to her. She wanted one of her sons to get more attention from the coach, and she wanted her other son to get more support to do his best at school. She didn’t think this was happening, in either case. I had no idea if her perspective was correct, and wasn’t likely to find out by asking her! I said, “So it’s important to you that your son gets the opportunity to be the best he can be.”

She sighed, said yes, and her shoulders dropped.

I hadn’t agreed with her, yet she felt understood. I did understand her – I also wanted my own children to have the opportunity to do their best. I just had a different way of going about trying to get what I believed they needed to achieve that. This isn’t a story of how we became best buddies. I still found the rest of the hour we sat together quite difficult, but it helped me to see that even with parenting styles that were radically different on the surface, there was mutuality and space for understanding.

Some of you may be thinking that in writing this post I put myself down. You might imagine that I am feeling bad just now. You might even be muttering to yourselves that I was doing the best I could, so I shouldn’t blame myself.

That’s another way we keep ourselves trapped in the Mommy Wars – by trying to make excuses for ourselves or our friends. We don’t need excuses; we just need love. In recognising that I would do things differently now, that had I had more insight twelve years ago I would have done things differently then, I’m not saying I did anything wrong. I did do the best I could, given my own particular life tapestry.

Woven into my life tapestry is the day a man I vaguely knew attacked me and briefly held me hostage, along with the day a stranger followed and accosted me in broad daylight. Also included in it is my mother’s grief, and a whole host of other experiences, some of which are probably still locked out of my awareness. I do know that the experiences I had meant that, like Julie Jo, I was more anxious about my children’s safety than some other mothers might have been. For years, in spite of knowing the circumstances of my life, I judged myself. I’d see the words “helicopter parent” and panic, thinking it was me and it was wrong.

So now, it’s not hard to see that ending the Mommy Wars starts with ending the war within ourselves. And then, before criticising any parent – including ourselves – we can pause and wonder, “What have they been through?”

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