Thought experiment

Imagine for a moment what you would be like as a mother if you had never read any parenting magazine or website; any book on how to raise, teach, or discipline your kids; any blog about how some person you've never met runs her kitchen and her bathroom and her nursery and her yard.

Imagine what you would be like as a mother if the main observations you had made about being a mother were of your immediate and extended family of origin, and your other observations were of people whom you know personally (internet only soul-acquaintances get no more than half credit, and that's just to be nice).

You wouldn't necessarily be better, but you would surely be different. The world's experts and pseudo-experts, fearmongers and doubt-raisers, tyrants and aspiring tyrants, paranoiacs and politicians, bloggers and braggers (forgive the redundancy) are good primarily for a laugh. After that: vanity, vanity.

When I try this exercise, I envision some concrete things (like fewer stupid library books brought home out of some sense of should-itude), but mostly less worrying about if I'm spending enough time and dispensing enough affection and disciplining with enough wisdom. I see myself not thinking about how Goneril's kids were all potty trained at 18 months (or four years), and caring what Brunhilde will say if I confess I'm really sick of everything I swallow and spray and put leftover pizza sauce in being a HEALTH!! issue, and searching for meaning in Zdenka's disclosure that her 3-year-old learned how to read in 100 easy lessons, and trying to figure out if a cluttered house is a sin or if thinking a cluttered house is a sin is a sin.

I trust whom I trust, and realize that only one of them is trustworthy. The rest, mostly as unqualified as I to make most of the everyday judgments I must make, provide comfortable camaraderie, not confirmation of the rightness of those judgments. Everyone else is comic relief, and if I can't laugh about it, I steer clear.