Wednesday, February 16, 2011

schedules and judgement

I want Beckham to be on a schedule. Period. I honestly feel like if he would be on a consistent schedule I would want for nothing. Clearly I'm delusional. Today I let him cry for an hour and a half instead of napping while being held (which he prefers, wouldn't you?) and then tried to keep him up until what I deemed should be his next nap time. I think that if I keep doing this within a couple days he'll take a nap when I want him too and we can have some consistency. I'm probably dead wrong, because there is a whole other blogs worth of factors that are hindering this schedule.

Which leads me to my next point, which is, that probably every mother that read that paragraph has some advice on what I should be doing differently or what they did that worked or what their favorite baby guru says. Lots of it I would want to hear and could potentially be really helpful, all of it will probably make me feel insecure and judged.

This is going to be a bold statement: I have never in my life joined a group that automatically comes with so much insecurity, judgement, and competition as motherhood. That is a bold statement because I am female and most 'groups' that I am a part of consist mostly of females, and lets face it, insecurity and judgment come pretty easy for us. I mean I thought after social club I could never be a part of something that bred more of those things, but motherhood probably just tops it. Before I had a baby of my own I noticed it so much in moms' conversations, blogs, facebook status' etc, and I did not want to be a part of it. But of course I have inevitably fallen into the trap more than once and its stupid and does no one any good, espcially me.

I get why it happens, because what has ever mattered as much as your kid? You want to do the 'right' thing, the 'best' thing for them and you want others to think you are doing that too. But the truth is no one else has my personality, Beckham's personality, Adam's personality combined with Adam's job and my classes and the things we need to do to make us happy and content people which will make us the best possible parents we can be. Nor do I have anyone else's personality or stressors so I can't possibly comprehend why they do the things they do, as much as I think I can.

Goodness, that whole paragraph just made me exhausted.

Bottom line is I'm going to try and do better to not perpetuate the problem. For me part of that is not taking everything personally and to stop assuming that everyone is judging me, because in truth they most likely aren't. I need to stop comparing and start accepting that everyone is doing the best that they can, including me.

So, we'll see how this nap schedule thing goes. To be honest I'm probably traveling too much to get him on a good schedule. But I would like him to take some good naps so I can plan our travels better, what a conundrum. I'm sure we will all survive and barely remember this time in a year or two (obviously Becks won't care) and hopefully I can handle it all a little more gracefully the second go round.
Here is a cute picture to lighten the mood:

Thankfully he likes me no matter how dramatic I choose to be on a daily basis. :)