Joy is a word we associate with becoming a parent. But there can be a strange iffiness about sharing the good stuff. Everyone knows that parenthood – especially motherhood – is a minefield from the get-go. You’re sleep-deprived, you’re hormonal, you’re riding some serious emotional highs and lows, and embarking on probably the highest-stakes venture of your life.
Everyone has their opinions, and pretty soon you do too. You urgently need advice, and there’s no shortage of it. Sure, lots of this advice is not only dogmatic but contradictory, and the algorithm floats all the most guilt-inducing content to the top. There’s little consensus (unless it’s that you’re definitely not doing enough tummy time).
The group chat with other new mums can be a lifeline. It may be the blind leading the blind, but at least you’re all going through the same things together. Except when you’re not. It’s a perilous journey out on to that limb, to say to a fellow mum that I’m struggling with this or I’m loving that. There’s payoff in the solidarity of the “me too”. But if you share something difficult and get a blank face in return – not their experience – you can feel cast down and even more isolated. If you share something positive and the experience is not shared, they can easily be cast down or unsettled by it. Nobody’s fault; still, a minefield.
How do you share somebody’s experience if you don’t, well, share their experience? The piece of advice that keeps recurring to me as I step gingerly through the minefield is this one: rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn. It’s from the Bible, the Apostle Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome, and it neatly sums up how to do life with people whose circumstances are sometimes much better and sometimes much harder than your own. When any one member of the group has something to celebrate, we all have something to celebrate. When any member is cast down, we’re all cast down.
It sounds straightforward enough, but it takes quite a bit of emotional agility to do both at the same time – to celebrate people’s wins when you’re deep in the slog, or to enter into someone’s woes when things are going well for you. When it comes to motherhood, there’s been a huge swing in recent times towards the “mourn with those who mourn” side of the equation. There’s a whole genre of social media post that begins “What nobody tells you about having kids is …” followed by whatever is currently driving them crazy about their kids. But as parenthood loomed for me, it felt like all anyone tells you about having kids is the hard stuff: the loss of sleep, time, autonomy, even self. Practically every mummy blog for the last 20 years has gone into great detail about what a hard job this is.
All this is a great advance on the conspiracy of silence that (to some extent) once existed – the sense that it would be betraying your kids and your sacred vocation as a mother to acknowledge that you don’t exactly love everything about it, all the time. The solidarity of mourning with those who mourn – venting with those who vent? – is hard-won, and cathartic. But have we lost the knack of the opposite – rejoicing with those who rejoice?.
(Just anecdotally here, I wonder if the pattern is reversed for men. The stereotype was once that guys chafed more at the constraints of family life. But while we waited for our munchkin to arrive, my husband had more than one male colleague tell him: don’t listen to the negativity; having kids is the best.).
Joy is definitely a word we associate with becoming parents. But there can be a strange iffiness about sharing the good stuff. Laments for lost sleep or lost sanity meet a sympathetic ear, but to enthuse about time with your baby can sound like bragging, or trigger an uneasy competitiveness. It’s basic politeness, of course, not to mention to other new parents that your baby is sleeping through the night. (And prudence, maybe; sleep deprivation makes us a bit murderous.) But why does it sometimes feel like it’s only acceptable to be open about what sucks?.
I flip back to that rejoice/mourn passage to find another key to navigating the minefield: love must be sincere, it says. Love, the simplest and the hardest thing in the world. If we’re genuinely – sincerely – seeking the good of the other person, then it becomes not only possible but intuitive to enter into their joy or pain, and to regulate our own decisions about what and how much to share. Love can rush in where the prudent fear to tread.
It also makes space for our mistakes. Love covers over a multitude of sins: another nugget of wisdom, from elsewhere in the New Testament. You can forgive a lot from someone who you know wants only good things for you. To rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn is an art. The art of celebration and the art of empathy – both crucial to the art of community. It takes a village, they say. Even if that village is built on a minefield.
