Comparison is the Thief of Joy
I recently heard from a friend who was saying “man, you are so good at carving out time to read aloud with your kids, and visit the library and do audio books with them, I don’t really do any of those things and I wish I did.” The first thing that came to my mind when I heard this (which I said aloud to her) was “oh my gosh but I look at what YOU do with your kids and think ‘man I wish I liked hiking or taking my kids on outdoor adventures, I should do that more often!’” It’s SO easy to compare what we each do with our families or in our free time because of social media, isn’t it? It used to be that you really never knew how another family spent their weekend unless you talked to them. However, thanks to the internet, we now find ourselves thinking “man, that mom is ROCKING summer, look at all the fun things they’ve done together,” or “look at her doing that super cool craft project with her kids, I wish I liked doing crafts with mine! I wonder if my kids will grow up somehow deprived if we aren’t painting dried macaroni at my kitchen table?” I do read with my kids, not every day but we make that a huge priority in our house because I LOVE it. It’s not a chore for me or work for me and is a great way to pass time on the floor with my boys while they quietly play without actually having to pretend to be some Lego character that I don’t understand in the slightest. But this conversation with my dear friend got me thinking about how many gifts we all have as parents and how we each parent out of our own interests and strengths, which is a beautiful thing!
One of my very favorite essays is found in Shauna Niequist’s book Bittersweet, and its called The Things I Don’t Do. In it she gives herself the freedom to own the things she’s just not interested in or good at doing. We can’t all do it all. I can’t teach my kids to love books, the outdoors, school, friendships, cooking, camping, team sports, our faith community and serving others all in the same season of life. That’s enough to make any person exhausted just thinking about! What I can do is play to my strengths, lean on what our family values, and let that be good enough for right now, knowing in another season our priorities may shift.
One of the things Shauna writes in this essay is “it’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.” So she created a list of the things she loves and cares about and the things she does not do in order to have time and space for the first list. I read a lot to my kids, I make sure they are in church every Sunday unless someone is sick, and I take them on lots of outings with friends because books, faith, and living life in intentional community with others are three of my highest priorities and values in life. But you know what I don’t do? I don’t craft with my kids. Ever. A year ago I made slime with them in the kitchen and thought I’d have a nervous breakdown from the mess and that was the last time we “crafted” together at all. I don’t garden with them. I have a beautiful friend here who is an incredible mom and she and her kids have created the greatest vegetable garden in their yard together and every time I’m at her house I think I should probably do that someday. But when it comes down to it, that’s not at all how I want to spend my time. And that’s okay! It doesn’t make me a less than mom because I’m not teaching my kids to grown their own food. My kids haven’t ever been to Disney. We’re planning on taking them at some point in the next year but it will honestly probably be something we do as a family only once or twice in their growing up years because my husband and I really don’t love amusement parks or spending a lot of money on a one day experience. Other families love Disney and that’s fantastic, but we’d just rather do other things with our time and our resources, no one family can do it all—every decision we make is a yes to something and has to be a no to something else.
The same applies for those who aren’t parents or whose kids are grown—it is not just moms who play the comparison game! We look at our friend who is amazing at home DIY remodel projects and think we “should” be doing the same thing or another person’s posts about their workout routines and feel somehow like we aren’t living up to their standard because we don’t spend 3 hours in the gym multiple times a week. Friends, if you need it today, I want to give you permission, the next time you see someone post something that triggers a “oh man I should be doing that…” response in you, stop for a minute and think about the amazing things you DO fill your life with and celebrate what you DO instead of what you don’t do. We can’t all fill our 24 hours with the same activities and this whole idea of comparing how we spend our time with how another person spends theirs is robbing us of experiencing peace in whatever it is we are doing. Especially as we head into summer, as we start seeing posts of friends doing differernt things with their kids, may we be able to celebrate what they are doing without feeling “less than” for not doing the same things. As the poet Mary Oliver writes “what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It’s not going to be the same as what I’m going to do with mine. And that is what makes this world so so wonderful.
