Dear Every Mother Everywhere: Stop Being an Asshole. You're Screwing Up Your Kids, Too.

Dear Every Mother Everywhere,

Stop being an asshole. You're screwing up your kids, too.

Mom who looks disdainfully at the other kids' lunches of prepackaged lunch meats and fruit snacks made of 100% high-fructose corn syrup while unpacking your child's organically grown quinoa and self-fertilized veggies, patting yourself on the back for choosing not to pollute your child's body........yeah, that's screwing your kid up.

Mom with the Lunchable thrown hastily in the lunch box because that's what your kid asked for "just like the other kids" and who the hell has time to make a sandwich these days?........yeah, that's screwing your kid up.

Mom who never lets her child out of her sight outside of the home, homeschools her children, and has parental controls that block everything from every screen device in her home? Screwing up your kid.

Mom who believes in free-range parenting so your kids will learn independence and self-reliance? Your kids are screwed too.

Every choice you make as a mother? I can give you 100 reasons why it's going to land your kid on a therapy couch one day. And if you made the opposite choice instead? I can give you a thousand reasons that would screw up your kid.

So stop being such an asshole and judging everyone else's shitty decisions. Yours are shitty, too. They're just shitty in a different way.

About 5 years ago, I made a conscious decision to stop being so judgmental of other people. This was not a goal that was easily undertaken. I grew up in a family that thrives on judgment. We judge each other. We judge other people. And then we talk about our judgments behind each others' backs. And sometimes to each others' faces. And then we all feel better about ourselves for at least not being like that person. And then we turn around and talk shit about the person we were just talking shit to.

About 5 years ago, I started to realize a few things. I realized that:
1. I was so judgmental of other people I pretty much hated everyone.
2. Everyone else's family seemed to do the same thing to each other and it just made everyone a complete asshole.
3. I didn't want to raise assholes.
4. I couldn't raise kids who weren't assholes if I kept being an asshole myself.
5. If I wanted to stop being an asshole, I needed to start understanding why people made the stupid choices they made.

I'd like to say that those realizations made me stop judging people and start loving everyone. They didn't. I still find myself sitting down with my kids at the cafeteria table when I visit them for school lunch and rolling my eyes at the lunch in front of the 8-year-old who has 50 lbs on me, a lunch that consists of a peanut-butter-and-jelly-and-more-jelly sandwich on bleached white bread with a giant bag of chips, a fruit roll-up, and two Ding Dongs, to be washed down with Kool-Aid. And before I can stop myself, I judge the mother who packed it.

But now I force myself to think about why. I remind myself that statistically, the majority of severely overweight children come from families with a lower socioeconomic status. And a limited grocery budget can stretch a lot farther to fill bellies with junk food than it can buying fresh vegetables and whole grains. I remind myself that children learn their eating habits from their parents, and that we live in a country fraught with unhappy people, and unhappy people often eat to fill an emotional void.

And most important, I remind myself of those mornings when I wake up late because I was up all night dealing with a tidal wave of vomit from the stomach flu of bubonic plague proportions that has swept through my household, go to the kitchen to pack a hasty lunch for the kid who stopped puking enough hours ago to return to school, only to find that the last remaining fruit in the house (where I have been trapped with the acidic stench of regurgitated Sprite for 5 days straight) is 4 strawberries that have sprouted a head of mold hair that would make Bruno Mars swoon with jealousy, and I used the last of the bread to make the toast that is even now revisiting daylight into a trashcan beside Kid 3's bed, so I throw a hunk of lunch meat in a baggie and call that cup of "Strawberry Cheesecake" yogurt that's going to expire tomorrow a fruit because it says "Strawberry" in the name, finishing up with a PopTart, because grains, and a plastic water bottle that will end up killing baby dolphins in a landfill somewhere because I forgot to run the dishwasher last night and all the reusable water bottles are crawling with the aforementioned plague. And on those mornings, as my kid walks out the door in an inside out shirt and mismatched socks with uncombed hair, I dare some other mother at the lunch table to judge me.

And then I turn down the judgment of other mother and mostly just sit there being jealous of that kid's Ding Dong. Because yum.

As I've gone through this journey of recognizing my own assholeness, I've become increasingly aware of how horrible we mothers actually are to each other. Even to our "friends." We constantly find ways to work into the conversation how much better our kids are than everyone else. Better adjusted. Smarter. More athletic. More popular. Because we are such stellar mothers by comparison. We are passive-aggressive total assholes to each other. We would all swear up and down we aren't like that. But the mom's who are protesting the loudest? Those are the ones who do it the most. Yeah, I'm talking about you.

And the moms who aren't there for the conversation? It's almost impossible to get through longer than 30 minutes talking with other mothers before someone starts in. How that one mom is screwing up her kid by not medicating his ADHD. How that other mom is screwing up her kid by medicating her ADHD. How that mom thinks her kid has ADHD but really he's just spoiled. That kid isn't in enough activities and that's going to make him too introverted to succeed in life. That kid is in too many activities and never has downtime, which is going to make her too competitive and unhappy as an adult. She made her kid mean and bossy. She made her kid pathologically shy. She made her kid too nerdy by pushing academics too hard. She made her kid stupid by letting him play videogames too much. She's too overprotective. Her kids run wild. She's giving her kid anxiety over grades. Over sports. Over popularity. Over looks. Over life.

Yes. She did. That mom did do that and that kid is going to have to work through that shit with a professional someday.

But guess what, lady......so is yours. Because the way you are doing the exact opposite of all that stuff you are judging them for? Just as bad.

And here's the thing. All that judging we are doing? It isn't really because we think we are such better parents than everyone else. It's because we are afraid we aren't.  Every mother I know is practically paralyzed by guilt at the thought that she isn't a 100% perfect mom 100% of the time. We are all terrified of failing our kids. And we are all terrified that the other mothers will figure out how we are screwing up our own kids. Every one of us. Whether the lunchbox contains coconut water extracted from the fruit of trees untouched by human hands atop a mountain visited only by Tibetan monks or a Red Bull.

So can we all just stop being assholes? I will be the first to admit, I am screwing my kids up on a daily basis. Right now, as I write this, I have a kid crying because she wants me to paint her nails and I told her I wanted to have some "me time" for 30 minutes first. And that 30 minutes has been more like 45. Her therapist is going to hear all about her selfish mother someday and how it gave her feelings of inadequacy and a desperation to be loved. But if I immediately set down the computer when she brought me the nail polish and ran to do her bidding (which I did yesterday, by the way)? Her therapist would hear how she has trouble getting along with people because they think she's too entitled, and that's her mother's fault for never teaching her to respect other people's needs.

There is a big movement right now where mothers are being encouraged to stop competing with each other, because there is no "wrong" way to mother as long as you love your children.

Screw that. Let's stop competing with each other because there is no RIGHT way to mother, no matter how much you love your children.

One thing I have learned in the last 5 years as I strived to understand the why of every what when I feel myself starting to judge someone is that every one of us is screwed up in our own way. All of us. No exceptions. All of our mothers (and other parental figures; dads are not exempt here in the least) screwed us up and we are just passing the legacy down to our own children. Along with the green eyes and weird butt dimple.

The important thing? That's a good thing. Because if no one was screwed up, no one would be the least bit interesting. Or exciting. Or fun.

So yes, you are screwing up your kids. And that is FABULOUS.

Now stop being an asshole and let the other mothers proceed with screwing up their own kids.