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  There’s an email that does the rounds every so often, and although it varies in content, it’s a stingingly accurate representation of just how competitive motherhood has become. Check out the list and see how many you can tick off!

  You know you’re a competitive mum if:

  * You read War and Peace to your six-month-old and insist on telling everyone Tolstoy is your baby’s favourite author.

  * You realise you have more toys than the local playgroup and more books than the library.

  * You dine on nothing but castor oil and lemon juice for weeks to drop your baby weight and then tell people ‘the weight just fell off’ once you started breastfeeding.

  * You say things like, ‘Oh it must be so tiring to have such a whiney baby. I got lucky of course – she’s an absolute angel!’

  For most of us, this less than positive side of motherhood reveals itself in pregnancy, a time when we’re supposed to be glowing with good health and well wishes. I mean, hands up if you didn’t compare your bump with other bumps in your antenatal class, or felt like shit the time you saw that six-foot Amazonian model with a compact bump wearing an almost identical outfit to you? You might have checked a few friends’ nurseries to get ideas on how you can do things better, or even bought loads of insanely expensive baby goods items for the purely illogical reason that you just want your baby to have what other people perceive to be ‘the best of the best’. And before you know it, junior has shot out into the world and you’re suddenly trading war stories on whose birthing experience was the best with other mums in the ward. It sounds horrific I know, but it’s probably the best introduction you could possibly have to your mothers’ group.

  Although their purpose is to bring together women living in a particular locale who have given birth to a baby around the same time and offer them some much-needed peer support, if you don’t get the right group, you can often walk away from these gatherings with a strong urge to hang yourself from the nearest branch. In fact, an Australian study has found such groups have the power to make mothers feel even more guilty than usual by giving them an opportunity to compare themselves and their children to others and find faults. ‘I know my son needs the social interaction so I force myself to go, but sometimes I wonder if we’d be better off if we kept to ourselves,’ admits my colleague Cassie. ‘For the most part, I try to rise above this behaviour but the more I hear “my genius baby did this and this”, I feel I have to one-up everyone else and I find myself saying the most horrid things just to stay ahead of the game,’ reveals another poor mum who is so mortified by her behaviour she doesn’t even want me to give her a pseudonym.

  If you think it’s just you, or the area you live in, it’s not. A recent UK study found two-thirds of mums find great joy in boasting about their child, with developmental milestones being the most popular topic. Nearly half the women surveyed admitted they were desperate for their baby to crawl, walk and talk first within their group (and I think we can safely assume the other 50 per cent were lying when they said they didn’t care one iota). And while we’re still on numbers, 80 per cent of the mums said they didn’t like their competitive nature but most said they just couldn’t help it. Social analysts maintain bragging about our kids is encoded in our DNA, but does that make it alright?

  Anyway, before we know it, our year with the modelling agency is up and a renewal letter arrives in the post. In that time we’ve attended countless castings – all of them ending very, very badly – before I gave up four months into it and stopped attending no matter how many calls we received. Nina, in all her infinite wisdom, was right of course: not only was Cella with her psychotic nature not cut out for the world of baby modelling, neither was I. The past year held a mirror up to a side of me I’ve found to be absolutely reprehensible; I beat my chest and declared my baby to be better than every other baby, I picked apart other mothers who are every bit as vulnerable as me. I may have even called one or two babies ‘ugly’. And what kind of person does that?

  I don’t want Cella to grow up wondering if she’s not pretty enough, smart enough, or vivacious enough, so I rip up the renewal letter that arrives in the mail and put the baby modelling (and maternal competitiveness) to bed once and for all. God knows she’ll have enough of this crap to deal with when she becomes a mother herself one day. Shudder.

  Why do I need to be so much better than every other mother who has ever walked the face of this Earth?

  Q&A with Doctor Lissa Johnson, principal psychologist, Lissa Johnson & Associates (lissajohnson.com.au)

  Women are great at so many things. We squeeze babies out of vaginas, walk on eight-inch heels like we’re floating on air and manage to wear ten hats simultaneously, so why then are women – particularly mothers – so competitive?

  Women are subjected to a kind of cultural perfectionism whereby they are inundated by social templates of the ideal woman. This ideal is full of contradictions and impossible to achieve. It involves being beautiful, skinny, youthful, fit, successful, intelligent, independent, not too independent, strong, not too strong, career-focused, well dressed, well groomed, always ready for sex, up for fun, kind, nurturing and all of the qualities traditionally expected of women.

  Many contemporary Australian mothers, like their counterparts in other advanced economies, are also subjected to an additional set of expectations around ideal nutrition, exercise, weight, sleep, sun protection, sun exposure, schooling, screen time, care arrangements, social skills, behaviour, wellbeing, parenting practices and so on. While remaining the primary carer and doing most of the housework in the majority of families, many women are expected to also uphold their careers.

  How does this ideal affect us?

  It’s easy to feel insecure about the reality of your own life under the weight of these pressures and expectations. Competition may be a way to convince yourself that you are doing okay. It is also normal to compete when you are already pushing yourself beyond your limit. Competition can be a way of driving yourself on, like an athlete in a marathon.

  In addition to cultural pressures there are aspects of motherhood that can foster competition with peers and friends. Motherhood carries enormous challenge and responsibility. If you have a habit of rising to life’s challenges by competing, it can be a potent trigger for your competitive streak.

  Motherhood can also be central to a person’s sense of identity. The more your self-worth is tied to your sense of success as a mother, the more you might compete to succeed. You might also view your child as an extension of yourself and feel that if your child is special you are special too.

  It is natural to view our children as the most precious, magical, smart, cute, funny, wonderful creatures imaginable. Acknowledging that your child is a normal child like any other might threaten to burst that lovely bubble.

  Conversely, some mothers lack the intense bond with their child that they would like. Competing may be an attempt to compensate.

  Maternal guilt can also play a role. Mothers who work often feel guilty about working. Mothers who don’t often feel guilty about that. Each might compete with the other to convince themselves that their life choice is the right one.

  If you’re a particularly competitive person, does this mean you’re a terrible person with a black, empty heart?

  No, but low self-esteem plays a large role in this. When people lack individual self-worth they look to their social categories for a sense of value or status, and seek to elevate themselves above others based on those roles. If you struggle to feel worthwhile in your own right you may hang your self-esteem on motherhood and your kids and seek to elevate yourself on that basis. This can be exacerbated when women have given up work for motherhood. Lacking a career by which to define themselves, motherhood might step in to fill the void.

  Another psychological strategy to manage self-esteem is social comparison. Downward social comparison, where we compare ourselves favourably to others, can be a strategy for boosting self-esteem, albeit temporarily.<
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  These tendencies can be exacerbated by perfectionism. Healthy standards are flexible, realistic and motivating. Perfectionistic standards are unrelenting and unattainable. You never feel good enough and are prone to competing to push yourself over the bar.

  Another factor concerns your view of yourself in relation to others. Psychologists call 50–75 per cent of people ‘securely attached’. This means that they view others as generally warm, responsive and trustworthy, and are likely to reach out for friendship and support to feed self-worth. The alternative is to see others as generally hostile and a threat. This fuels a tendency to pit yourself against others and to compete rather than connect.

  Is this sort of competition really all that healthy?

  While healthy striving is productive, a competitive attitude to motherhood comes with a price. Children are acutely attuned to their parents’ attitudes and will pick up on your wish for them to outdo their peers. Children need to feel valued, accepted and appreciated just as they are. If you are perpetually striving for better and more they will perpetually feel that they are not good enough for you. This can translate into a chronic sense of unworthiness and long-term problems with self-esteem.

  Children may also emulate their parents’ constant over-striving, resulting in a perfectionist relationship with the world. Perfectionism is linked to a range of psychological difficulties other than competitiveness, including anxiety, depression, procrastination and anger, to name a few.

  A competitive attitude also puts distance between you and your child. It stops you truly valuing the child you have, and keeps you focused instead on an imagined ideal. By continually evaluating your child and superimposing your expectations, you blind yourself to the idiosyncratic magic of the little human being in front of you.

  Competition also alienates you from other mums. People don’t like to feel bad about themselves. If you place your child above theirs, other mums will give you a wide berth, at least emotionally if not literally. Competitive mums may lock into a veiled battle with you, but this is a hollow substitute for a close bond.

  You also cut yourself off from important sources of support. Motherhood is hard, and if you are open about your struggles as a mother others will open up to you in return. It is far more relaxing to share your imperfections than to hide them. Motherhood can be a very connecting experience if you let go of your competitive tendencies.

  Not least, competition is an ineffective strategy for boosting self-esteem. There will always be someone better, smarter, happier, calmer, healthier, wealthier, prettier or funnier than you. Seeking to outshine your friends ultimately leaves you feeling second best. Moreover, having felt the sting of your competitive streak, others will be reluctant to give you praise. You rob yourself of the lovely glow that comes from being appreciated and enjoyed.

  How do you know when you’re being competitive?

  You know you are being competitive when:

  * You resent others their successes or joys.

  * You are secretly pleased by others’ failures and disappointments.

  * You feel personally slighted by a friend or their child’s achievements.

  * You dislike another child because they outshine yours.

  * You dislike another mother because she outshines you.

  * You are looking for a subtle way to demonstrate your own or your child’s superiority in some domain.

  * You are looking for a subtle way to demonstrate someone else’s or their child’s inferiority in some domain.

  * You are planning how to outdo someone else’s party, clothes, performance, achievement, toys, friendships, outings, etc.

  * You are imagining how much others will envy this dress, toy, event, experience, cooking, achievement, etc.

  * You feel others don’t appreciate how special you or your child are.

  * You find yourself dishing out a profusion of fake gushing enthusiasm and praise to disguise your underlying barbs.

  What are your top tips on how to stop yourself from being competitive the next time you feel the urge rising?

  1. Disentangle your self-worth from your child. They are their own people and not a symbol of your success. Find ways to improve your self-esteem independent of them. This will anchor you when your competitive streak flares.

  2. Let go of perfection. It is a mirage. Practise valuing yourself just as you are. Look at your children without the lens of evaluation. Rather than appraising them, be curious about them. Assume that there is much you don’t know. Set yourself the task of getting to know your children better, just as they are.

  3. Delight in the magic of others’ children. Practise seeing them as wonderful little people full of enchantment and surprise, different but no better or worse than your own.

  4. Connect rather than compete. Identify the vulnerabilities fuelling your competitive urge – your fears, failures, regrets, frustrations, confusion, exasperation, insecurities and disappointments. Try sharing them with other mothers instead of competing. Focus on your common humanity and common ground. You will feel supported and affirmed, and having shared your weaknesses others will want to celebrate your strengths. Before long you won’t need to compete to feel worthwhile anymore.

  I hate maternity leave

  WOOOO!!!! HOOO!!! Maternity leave is finally over and it’s my first day back at work. This can only mean one thing – euphoria. Some mums might be more than a little sad at the thought of kissing their babies goodbye after a solid year of sitting around and playing with them. Other mums might experience terror at the idea of saying goodbye to untold days of freedom and returning to structured days under the constant gaze of a superior and a gaggle of intolerable colleagues. Not me. After what feels like 12 months of slave labour and abject misery, I wake up with a spring in my step. Today is the day I get the life I recognise back. One that doesn’t feature pulling bits of wet teething rusks from my hair in front of endless episodes of Waybuloo, or spending hours talking to other mums with whom I have little in common about our babies’ poo/vomit/sleep patterns. No, I will sit quietly at my desk and write stories and read copy and magazines, and talk to other adults about things other than small people. Woohoo! This mummy has exited the building.

  The office, I’m happy to say, is just as I left it. My desk is piled high with paperwork and mountains of books. There are coffee rings on everything thanks to years of a crippling caffeine addiction, and my chair, worn perfectly to the groove of my back, beckons alluringly. Sighing happily, I run my hands all over it like it’s a prize-winning stallion, and turn on my computer, almost melting with joy at the familiar sounds. It’s a Thursday morning, which means the international magazines have arrived, so for the next two hours I sit, drinking coffee and reading everything from O, the Oprah magazine and Vanity Fair to People and Us Weekly in absolute silence. Well, it would be silent, if I didn’t keep turning around to my colleagues, exclaiming, ‘Can you seriously believe we get PAID to do this?’ They look at me like I’m crazy; it’s not like we’re doing anything we haven’t all done a million times before, but as a mum who previously couldn’t get through a single page without a ‘WAHHH!’ this is the most exciting thing I can ever imagine happening. I’m in my rightful place and I know it. I’m Dilvin Yasa once more.

  Some people are made to be mums, there’s no doubt about it. They dream of the day they’ll have a baby and thus be able to leave and devote themselves entirely to their families. I don’t begrudge these women a thing because there’s nothing harder than staying at home and looking after children at the expense of your own interests. You might have guessed this by now, but I’ve never been that kind of woman. I always knew I wanted children – it was a given I would have at least one child – but it’s fair to say I had absolutely no idea how difficult I would find it, and how little I would enjoy staying at home with a baby.

  It had nothing to do with Cella, and everything to do with me and how much of my personal identity I had staked on my profession. I’m what you
would call a classic Type-A personality and used to being in control, but suddenly with a sickly baby who screamed around the clock, not only did I have control ripped from my hands, I lost all direction and meaning. For the first few months I wandered the streets, trying to work out ways to fill the hours in my day. I couldn’t really freelance because Cella never slept, and adding to my misery was the growing suspicion that while I was always very good at my job, I quite possibly wasn’t anywhere near as good at being a full-time mum. I struggled to tell anyone how I felt because my ‘negative’ comments were always met with disapproval from other mums. ‘Isn’t this the best job in the world?’ they’d say, snuggling up to their perfect sleeping newborns. ‘WHAT??’ I’d yell over Cella’s screaming. ‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’ ‘I said, “ISN’T THIS THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD?”’ they’d yell back as I struggled to fit a dummy in Cella’s gob to calm her down. ‘No, no it isn’t,’ I would say. ‘I fucking hate it and I wish I were back at work already so I could write about how shit this all is to warn other women against doing it.’ And then things would become so silent, you could practically hear the crickets at work in the grass.

  Considering how I was feeling, I suppose it’s really quite amazing I didn’t climb a clock tower and gun down a small village, but I can say with absolute honesty that as awful as it was at the time, maternity leave turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me – because a few months in I began to rediscover an ambition that had been largely MIA for the past few years. During my last year in magazines, I had become uninspired and despondent, unsure if the industry was the right one for me. I never stopped loving what I did for a living, but because I’d been there for so long, things began to feel a little stale. But looking at Cella, three months after her birth, I began to feel a burning desire to build a better life for her. Life wasn’t bad by any means, but we lived in a rented apartment and like most families, had to count our pennies and be sensible a lot of the time. I now realised how much I wanted to buy our own home, go on yearly overseas holidays, and have enough padding in the bank so Cella would never experience any financial uncertainty as she grew up.