The best piece of advice I ever got as a new mom was this: Don’t judge and go with your gut. It is advice that I think about every day and nearly every moment as a parent.
My kid is now 3, nearly 4 and I am proud of the fact that I have kept her alive and well! In the short years of her life, though, I am pretty sure that I’ve judged and been judged. I mean, parenting, is sort of a trial by error thing, right?
However, as she has gotten older, I’ve been feeling the judgement thing a lot more. I’m not sure why I feel it more now – possibly because she’s much more of a human being than when she was a baby? Well, one that talks, has opinions, etc.
Let me give you my Judge Me Take 1 scenario and you give me your thoughts. Little lady and I went to our local cafe to grab some lunch. Little lady wanted to grab a table to sit at and I left her there with my phone and our stuff and told her that I would go an order our food and be right back. The cafe is not big, but quite busy during lunch time and it is a place that little lady and I have been going to since she was born. It’s a super familiar place for her. However, the place we chose to sit was not in my eye sight when I went up to order food. Of course, the line was really slow and it was taking forever to just order the sandwiches. As I am waiting, I can her her calling out “Umma, look at this!” Little lady is oblivious that we are in a cafe and this is not her home where I can just answer her if she calls out. All around me, I see eyes on me with judgement. I was getting ready to order and I didn’t know what to do – should I just get out of line and go to her? Should I just place our order? WHAT SHOULD I DO?
In that moment, I felt so lost and so judged. I didn’t know what my gut was telling me to do. This place felt safe, like a second home, so a part of me was thinking she would be ok. However, I just felt like everyone in the cafe was looking at me and saying, “How could you just leave your daughter unattended?” Yikes – did I really leave her unattended?
Eventually, she walked right over to me – she is familiar with this cafe and walks around like she owns it! We ordered our food and walked back to our table. But the whole time we were eating, I just wanted to get out of there because I could feel judgement burning all around me. I couldn’t go back to the cafe for a few days after that.
Now, I look around to see how do other parents handle this because even when I didn’t have kids, I always wondered – if I had two kids with my by myself at a restaurant and one of them had to go to the bathroom, what do I do? It was a mind baffling question to me at the time – now I know you take both kids with you to the bathroom and you also pray that those scenarios don’t come up when you are by yourself with the kids. 😉
What do you think?