Those who know me best know that I do not enter the great mom debate very often. You know the one. The one where you are sitting on a bench on a playground while your child digs around, both of you completely minding your own business, when your ears are accosted by The Debate: cloth diapers or disposable, vaccines or no vaccines, organic dye free hemp or high fructose sugar filled chemical laced cotton? Regardless of whether you yourself choose to participate in this debate, you can’t live as a mom in America and not get suckered into at least eavesdropping on the conversation. Do you know why this scenario is becoming more and more common? Because moms as a group are a force to be reckon with. We can’t help it. We are responsible for the care, well being and growth of another human being, one that we most likely carried around in our bodies for 9 months, and it can make you insane. It’s why moms lift trucks off of trapped babies, fight off rabid dogs on behalf of their kids and go toe to toe on the playground with another mom over the presence of goldfish crackers.
I recently read a blog that was talking about chicken pox. For those of you who have not entered the world of cribs, diapers and disease, chicken pox is a big deal right now. You and I probably had it as kids. This new generation entering the world most likely won’t ever get the chicken pox due to a new shiny vaccine you can get. This post I was reading was great. It talked about the pros and cons of the vaccine, whether it was good to intentionally expose your child to the chicken pox so they don’t get it at a later more complicated age, yada yada yada. Great. Then I got down to the comments section. I love online comment sections. People who would normally look down at their shoes during a heated public argument suddenly come alive at the prospect that no one knows who they are and has absolutely no way of actually looking them in the eye. People say the dumbest/most awesome/most offensive things in an online comment section. And this one was no exception.
Comment after comment of people going on and on about how they would love to expose their child to the chicken pox but they can’t find any kids with the disease. The humanity! (I could go on about this but it will squelch my point which is soon to come.) Needless to say, these moms, like most moms I know, were not without passion. They found this a serious issue that was threatening their child’s well being and they were going to release their rage into the wilds of the Internet. Mom rage reigned supreme.
And this got me thinking. What if, rather than letting our Mom Rage loose on some of these smaller issues, like the chicken pox, we let them loose on some really big issues plaguing our kids? This great state of Florida is ranked third in human trafficking! Third! The US is ranked number one in the world for mass public shootings! That’s a big deal. Even more directly hitting our kids is the fact that 16 million of them will go hungry in the US tonight. I’m not saying the other issues, the chicken pox, the diapers, the high fructose stuff isn’t important. It is. If it is important to you than it ranks somewhere on the scale of importance in your life and you should fight for it. You are entitled to your opinion and you are allowed to debate it on the playground and no one can take away that right. But let’s not only focus the mom rage on that stuff. That instinct inside of you that flares up when you watch one kid knock down yours or when you think about the amount of people who vaccinate their kids or who don’t vaccinate their kids, that instinct is good! Protect, defend, debate! But don’t limit your scope. Apply it to someone else’s kid some of the time. Protect someone who can’t protect themselves. Debate on behalf of someone who can’t yell anymore.
Let me close this with a story because I love stories. I have a good friend named Melissa. It is a running joke between Melissa and I (and anyone who knows both of us even slightly well) that we are the antithesis of each other mom-wise. You name a decision that you make on behalf of your child and Melissa and I have made the exact opposite choice. And it’s ok. Our kids are happy and healthy. Another thing you should know about Melissa is that she and her husband, Ian, are considering bringing in another child to their home through a domestic adoption sometime in the future. She and I were chatting about it the other day. We talked about why they were adopting domestically and why they were thinking about the age they were considering and when it all might happen. And I realized something: This conversation defined who Melissa is as a mom to me more than any other decision she has made with her kids thus far. She’s not my super hippy dippy organic mom friend. She’s my “I love kids so much that I want to rescue all of them and teach them who Jesus is” friend. She’s my “I will make a difference in the world” friend. She is using her mom rage to give a kid a home one day. And that, my friends, is an issue worthy of some serious mom rage.
Amen to ALL OF THIS!