lessons learned from three under three

plus, an essay on the flawed philosophy of “freebirth”

Implausibly, October is here. My eldest turned four yesterday. Dare I say that disbelief at the pace of the passing of time – whether the unbearably long days or the unfathomably short years – is a universal maternal experience. Oh, the melancholia of motherhood… the slippery seconds, the diamonds raining from the sky, the inability to catch them in your hands for longer than a moment. I love you. I love you more. Impossible.

In case you missed it, partially inspired by the anniversary of Mary Helen’s birth, I wrote an essay for my favorite publication, Fairer Disputations, on the flawed philosophy of freebirth. Would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Now that I no longer have three three and under, I thought I’d share my lessons learned from the experience, because people often ask how I manage. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel fully qualified to proffer parental wisdom. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and my kids are underbaked. But in terms of keeping one’s sanity and smoothing day to day operations, I think I have some helpful tips to share. My advice boils down to three virtues: courage, consistency, and creativity.

COURAGE.

Victim mentality is the antithesis of courage. It is pervasive, and it is practically, spiritually corrosive. Reject it.

One of the defining spirits of the modern age – unfortunately for everyone – is that which defines the self as a perpetual victim of circumstance and makes appeals to others, for pity or provision, on those terms. This is the heart of identity politics, and of leftism generally, and so plays a major role in formal political discourse domestically and internationally.

But the political right is not only not a stranger to this pattern of thought, self-identified right wing people often indulge it while they denigrate it in others. Take for example the ascendant “meninist” movement, which in many cases has retained the icon of victimhood, but simply switched its subjects from women to men. As a Catholic, I cringe to see the same tendency in reactionary traditionalist movements which seem to relish their status as perpetually persecuted. Social media enables it structurally by rewarding talk over action.

The metanarrative of personal victimhood endangers communities. This mindset arrests the individual’s capacity to self-govern and achieve real things in the real world. In psychological terms, it redistributes personal responsibility by externalizing locus of control. It relieves persons and groups of culpability. To a mind colonized by a victim narrative, free will is alien, and the triumph of the will over challenges big and small is regarded as impossible. If someone else succeeds, it must have been either a matter of luck or corruption. But rarely does victim mentality result in truly passive openness to the circumstances of life; instead, it encourages what Nietszche called slave morality: vicious manipulation disguised as virtue, cowardice, passive aggression, pathological consumption, and parasitical claims on the goods and services of others to compensate for one’s own impotence and discomfort. Altogether, it paves the way for totalitarianism by justifying the politics of resentment.

Everyone is touched by the zeitgeist. We are all subject to mainstream media and cultural narratives encouraging us to indulge our own sense of victimhood when things get hard: mothers, too. And, if we aren’t careful, we can come into agreement with something toxic and wallow. Life is unfair. No one is helping me. My husband doesn’t do enough for me. Society doesn’t do enough for me. My kids don’t do enough for me. There’s no sense in trying; things will never get better. This is too hard. 

It’s easy to indulge because it’s plausible. Raising children under the current socioeconomic conditions can be a real challenge. Sometimes our kids scream through the grocery store from entry to exit, neither responding to discipline or desperate pleas for cooperation. Sometimes our husbands disappoint us. Sometimes our efforts seem futile, and the “payoff” for maternal investment remains unclear for a very long time, by definition. But it has been so unspeakably important, in my experience, to resist the temptation to indulge these kinds of thoughts because they lead directly to passivity, despair, and overconsumption.

We can confront and negotiate the problems in our lives, and even the selfishness of other people, without allowing ourselves to self-identify, explicitly or implicitly, as victims. We can even recognize true victimhood without taking it on as an identity. In order to resist, we must put ourselves in the driver’s seat. 

• Stop complaining. Endless complaining is the one-way street to victim mentality. This is a choice. Realize that however much we may be disappointed by others, we disappoint them, too. This doesn’t mean don’t talk to you about your problems. It’s just better to orient speech toward action — and turn complaints into strategy.

• Evaluate circumstances objectively and wonder, first and foremost, possibilities for action. Seek and ye shall find. If you seek reasons to despair, you will find them. If you seek reasons to push, to reach higher, to go deeper, to forebear, to love, and to have courage, you will find them. This is a fundamental mindset shift toward positivity and production, rather than negativity and consumption. 

• Find the courage to fail. Believe in the possibility of action and results, and make goals, but choose action despite the possibility of failure. Objectively observe your own role in the order-to-chaos ratio of your life. How can you improve for the sake of improvement, regardless of how you might be immediately gratified? 

CONSISTENCY.

An object in motion stays in motion. Take this literally and figuratively.One of my earlier essays, “Olympic Motherhood” covers how retraining my brain to operate like an athlete’s made me a better mom. In terms of mindset, this dovetails perfectly with what I’ve just written about victim mentality, and goes further to emphasize the importance of literal physical activity.

I cannot overstate the degree to which prioritizing my physical health, mostly by lifting heavy almost every day, has given my days structure and magnified my energy in every other area of my life. This principle works just as well for intellectual goals as for physical goals. Whenever I feel depressed or anxious, exercise is the silver bullet. “There are no silver bullets,” sure, but have you tried deadlifts?

How do you find the time? Simple: choose it, and stop making excuses. Try your local YMCA, which often comes with an hour or two of free childcare for children under 5. Establish routine and structure around whatever you find, buoyed by the resolute determination to get out of the house every single day. Holding myself to this simple principle by continuously making the choice to forebear the annoying transition from the house to the car to the stroller and back again has done wonders for my mental and physical health. If you can simply make consistent movement a habit, it compounds. Over time, it becomes pleasurable.

CREATIVITY.

Find your community, no matter how unconventional the means.

The final helpful lifestyle shift that I believe is foundational to a good motherhood experience is two-fold: creativity and community. These things go together. Creativity fosters community, and community fosters creativity. When you find what you love to create, it attracts like-minded people. When you find people you love, you will be energized to create on their behalf.

To make community work in the modern world, one must be willing to be creative in their pursuit of it. A combination of the previous mindset shifts (“I have agency over my circumstances, and I can move freely in the world to achieve my goals”) must be present, as well as a willingness to try new things in order to meet people and maintain friendships.

Loneliness is one of the primary factors in poor mental health for modern moms. Isolation feels baked into the cake of American society, but this isn’t inevitable! No one ever said fellowship would be easy. The victim mentality would have lonely people believe that they are lonely because no one is reaching out to them. The couch potato mentality would have lonely people believe that because getting out of the house to commune with friends is difficult, that there is only one way of doing this, and that it is unworthy of doing. 

Here’s where all the principles dovetail together. The COURAGE mentality encourages lonely people to find friendship in the world, despite potential rejection. The CONSISTENCY mentality fosters a willingness to fail or to be rejected, and once friends are found, keeps them close through a sense of mutual duty and sacrifice. And CREATIVITY helps on the front end to find your people, and then again, to keep in touch with them.

Start the group chat. Start the playgroup. Ask someone to work out together. Attend birthday parties. Bake the cookies. Deliver the postpartum meals. Volunteer. Throw the cocktail parties. Buy outdoor art supplies for the kids and invite moms over for tea. These choice might seem mundane, antiquated. Because our social lives as moms have been so hollowed out by technology and the changing participation of women in the workplace, all of these little things in their little ways now require even more courage, consistency, and creativity. Despite whatever difficulties I endured moving from zero to one, they are what have made my life as a young mom of three boisterous little children not only bearable, but deeply enjoyable.

Hope these were helpful. I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments section: what helps you persist in motherhood?