Trading Comparison For Admiration

Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done, and you won’t need to compare yourself to anyone else. For we are each responsible for our own conduct.

VALENTINE’S DAY OF MY OLDEST CHILD’S kindergarten year was a shocking introduction to the world of what I (Julie) have coined Pinterest Momming. I’d thought my daughter’s store-bought Valentines with a sucker taped to the back were cute and fun until she came home with extravagant treat bags and carefully crafted homemade cards from the other kids. One child had made small piñata valentines for her classmates!

It was with a degree of disbelief and shame that I realized the valentines I’d helped my daughter with the night before were the simplest ones. As we surveyed her haul, it was particularly humiliating to hear her whisper, “My valentines are the worst ones!”

Of course, that was merely the beginning of my Pinterest Momming comparison problem. Elaborate 100 Days of School outfits, over-the-top leprechaun visits to ransack homes, with pots of golden candy left behind in apology . . . the Pinterest Momming waves of shame on random holidays and for unexpected reasons continually caught me by surprise during that first school year.

As a working mom whose skill sets did not (and still do not) include Elmer’s glue or construction paper, it was a wild, bewildering experience. While I was accustomed to managing the lure of comparison in other areas of my life, parenting competition and comparison continue to be particularly insidious and difficult for me to manage.

If I’m not careful, Advent can easily become a Pinterest Momming nightmare of insurmountable proportions. The Christmas season is replete with shelf elves who engage in hilarious activities and might tattle to Santa, elaborate interior and exterior decor that could grace the pages of a magazine, homemade treats based on culinary-school recipes, and gorgeous photo cards arriving in a deluge starting the beginning of the month—all of which involve skill sets beyond my capabilities and each of which can easily tie me in knots as I trip headlong into the comparison trap.

As I explained my struggle with the Pinterest Momming phenomenon, a dear friend challenged me to see the situation from her perspective. She falls squarely into my definition of a Pinterest Mom, and the very things that feel like a threat or affront to my mothering are simply her way of engaging in a joy-filled expression of creativity and love. She isn’t thinking about competing with my store-bought Valentines; she is fulfilling her desire to be creative in unique and life-giving ways. As a stay-at-home mom, she finds that opportunities for creative self-expression help offset her own secret fears and comparisons to working mothers.

Oh, the dangers of erroneous assumptions! My friend and I have each expended countless hours of energy fretting about how others (primarily women) view our parenting, only to find out that we had it all wrong. Of course, Pinterest, Instagram, and their ilk fan the flames of comparison and competition in quite literally every aspect of our lives. Someone is always doing it better than us—or that’s what the professionally filtered, carefully edited message will try to tell us.

Someone will always be craftier, smarter, or better at getting children to eat beets. They will magically be traveling constantly to exotic locales, and they will never, ever have a grumpy spouse. Their on-screen lives appear close to perfection while we look up from our screen to wistfully take in the sink full of dishes and the never-diminishing pile of random paper and life detritus cluttering our kitchen table.

Comparing our secret worst to the glamour of social media is a contest stacked against us. It’s in this pressure cooker of aspirational ideals versus harder-than-normal daily life that we crack. We begin to feel like we are the only ones struggling while everyone around is joyous 24-7 and doing all the things with no bickering, no crying, and no missteps.

Let’s jump off the aspirational bandwagon of false expectations—at Christmas and beyond—in every way and as soon as possible. And let’s keep jumping off as often as we need to. As today’s verse reminds us, focusing on the joy of what we’re doing, without concern for who is certainly doing it differently or better, keeps us rooted in present contentment.

And that’s where I long to be.

I want to enjoy the lopsided, two-trunked, real tree my family intentionally dragged home because we momentarily felt sorry for it.

I want to find my box of mismatched tree ornaments as beautiful as they are sentimental, despite the hilarious, tacky ones I love, the homemade ones toted home from preschool, and the utter lack of any theme, color or otherwise.

I want my family to respond to the potatoes spilled just as they were pulled from the oven with warm hugs and comforting words, along with some gentle laughter and teasing tossed around by the end of the meal about “if only we’d had potatoes . . .”

Can we let go of striving (however that looks to us personally) and simply enjoy, including embracing the times that are a bit rough in the moment but can be laughed about later? Spreading Christmas cheer is not a competition. And my role in bringing heaven to earth during this season should look different from yours.

If God created us as unique individuals with different skills, love languages, and circles of friends (and he did!), it stands to reason that what brings contentment, beauty, and joy to me is going to be different from what brings those feelings to you. I can find contentment in my unique giftings and skill sets and still sincerely appreciate, admire, and wholeheartedly applaud your giftings and skill sets without falling into the vortex of comparison.

Let’s give one another the gift of unconditional admiration this Christmas as we enjoy how others make Advent merrier and brighter in their own unique ways.

Heavenly Father, thank you for the infinite variations of creativity you’ve poured out among us. Thank you for expressions of joy as unique and individual as we are. Help us to recognize the collective beauty of our creativity rather than agonizing over the vicious cycle of who does what better than we do. May we be people who celebrate and appreciate the God-given creativity in one another rather than constantly measuring ourselves against it. Amen.