Bad Mothering as Virtue Signaling

Last updated on: September 16, 2016 at 8:04 am by Anne Kennedy

Bad Mothering as Virtue Signaling 2016-09-16T08:04:57-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Amen to this. What a great article. This subject–what I have been calling to myself the Failure Meme–has been percolating in the back of my mind for some many months. Megan Hill gets right to the heart of it but I want to take it all one step further.

She most astutely points out that the I’m The Worst Mother Ever meme has been some kind of probably welcome correction to the Look At Me Being Perfect Pinterest insanity that has overtaken the life of every female since the invention to Facebook and Twitter. We don’t wake up in the morning trying to outdo each other, but after scrolling repeatedly through everybody’s bright squeaky clean back to school pictures, eventually we all give in and take them, as I did yesterday, and shove them up and the wretched Internet. You do that for a while but you can’t keep up, You Can’t, and so when you discover Jen Hatmaker being hilarious about her terrible end of the year failures, you laugh with joy and happiness and chuck all the tiny little chalk boards in the bin. Then you go along calling yourself #worstmotherever because it feels more authentic.

But either way (and this is not Megan Hill, this is me swinging wildly in all the directions) you’re managing an image of yourself that you either do hold or want to hold. You’re, dare I say it, Virtue Signaling your good motherhood with the bad mother meme. Because what’s better than being perfect Pinterest? That’s right, much much better is sarcastic Cheerios on the floor but my kids are totally going to turn out awesome. There isn’t really a bad mother in this scenario. Confessing your Bad Mother status is really just the new and better way of signaling your goodness.

I’m allowed to say this because I’ve occasionally done it. I don’t really want to be a bad mother. And I certainly don’t want the Internet to think of me as one. But see, at my core, being a sinner, I am not Good. Failing to reach perfection, I trivialize and externalize my “brokenness” and still manage to come out with a net gain. Or so I hope. Which is the unthinking calculation of humanity. It’s why Jesus spent so much time humiliating the Pharisees, because they didn’t think of themselves as bad.

But sin is really the problem, not failing to keep all the balls perfectly in the air, as Megan Hill so rightly points out. If I’m going to end up being a Bad Mother it will be because I’m a sinner, not because I don’t have the perfect amount of chaos and funny anecdotes about my various failures. The failure is the failure not to sin, to neglect the confession of sin, to putter along beside Jesus, hoping he will show himself in a supportive congratulating way like Facebook, rather than as a savior.

This is why, just to continue to show you how overall good I really am, I generally try (and fail) to aim for the Helpless Failure meme. This isn’t because I’m an incompetent mother. I can clean my house and look after my children. To all appearances I have it together. I do stuff and go places and get dinner on the table and contribute to the life of my church etc. etc. But I cannot stop sinning, just like everybody else, and the sin is the toxic devastating element that can send the whole ship into Sheol. And I can’t forgive myself of my sin, or erase its effects. Only Jesus can do that. And who’s with me in wanting to admit that that’s humiliating.

The so called mommy wars I think are just the newest iteration of humanity’s most ancient problem. We externalize and trivialize our rebellion against God and redefine the whole mess to prove our goodness. And now we have the Internet to help us do it. The You Should Have It Together People battling it out against the If You Have A Clean House You’re Neglecting Your Children People are all together in the same boat of sinner. The battle is the symptom of every single sinner needing to be saved from pride, from sloth, from unkindness, from selfishness, from greed, from every single vice that separates us from the love and perfection of God.

But if you fling yourself on the mercy of Jesus, then he forgives you, and then nothing–none of those things–can separate you from the love of God. And so also with me. Pip pip.

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