No small thing

Once, in the Chicago O’Hare airport, my husband was stopped by a stranger who told him he was an amazing dad.

First, the truth: My husband is an amazing dad. Sometimes when I’m feeling panicky about parenthood, I remember that he is also in the yoke pulling right beside me, and I calm down a little.  

That being said.

At the Chicago O’Hare airport, my husband had put our baby into her carrier so he could walk her around the terminal and she could fall asleep. He was being kind to me, because I was stressed out about flying with the baby, and I’d slept about three hours the night before. But also he was just being a parent, and that is something parents do. They put their babies to sleep.

I am not upset that the stranger—a lady, maybe my mom’s age, silver-haired and kind, you could tell that—told my husband he was a good father. Because he is, and he deserves to be told so.

And he does get told, all the time. It seems like every time he’s carrying a baby or changing a diaper or doing a little daddy-daughter dance to the music piped onto the sidewalk, someone feels compelled to compliment his parenting.

The thing is, I can’t count the number of times I had put my baby in the carrier and walked her to sleep to the silence of strangers. None of them stopped to tell me what a great job I was doing. Nobody applauds my diaper-changing skills, or the voices I do when I read books at the library, or the way I’ll engage my daughter in pretend play about dinosaurs at the museum.

Frankly, it just didn’t feel fair. All my husband needs to do to get some positive feedback is show up on game day. But I’m there day in and day out without so much as a peep from the crowd.

Until last week.

Last week was awful. I slept an average of three hours per night. My two-year-old went on a nap strike. I basically lived on Cheerios and coffee. I think I showered twice all week, which is a problem when temperatures get up in the hundreds and we don’t have air conditioning.

I was sitting at the park while my older daughter played and my baby slept sprawled in my lap. And this lady walked by and said, “Oh, what a beautiful baby!”

And without really thinking, I said, “Thanks…I slept three hours last night.”

And this lady looked me straight in the eye and said, “Well, you look beautiful.”

And I burst into tears.

I mean, come on. The dark circles under my eyes, the greasy ponytail, the pale zombie skin, the wrinkled clothing? I felt anything but beautiful.

And then she went on, with feeling: “You’re doing such a great job. You are such a great mom.”

I couldn’t believe it. Because if I had to choose a moment to submit for the Greatest Mom Award, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen that moment. I would have chosen a moment of creativity, or calm patience, or just any moment when I didn’t feel like I was hanging by a thread.

But that was the moment—the only moment in three years—that a stranger told me I was a great mother.

And it made a huge impact.

I don’t think we, as a culture, are prone to complimenting and encouraging moms, in general. We take motherhood for granted in a way we would never do with fatherhood. And as women, we’re are often so busy engaging in Mommy Wars that it seems like we’re using the critical eye all of the time. (And I admit I’ve been guilty of this, many times over.)

I’ve seen lots of calls to end the Mommy Wars and let the breastfeeders breastfeed and the bottle-feeders bottle feed, and the stay-at-home moms stay at home and the working moms work and on and on. But still we’re silent when we see the moms in the park or the schoolyard or the museum or the airport, there on game day, day in, day out, doing the best they can.

Any woman has the power to do one of two things: to silently judge and cast furtive glances, or to take a real stand for the community of mothers worldwide, and open up her mouth to say, “You’re doing a great job.”

What I realized that day at the park is that there is power in the kind words of a stranger that no one else has. A kind word can be salve on your raw nerves. A kind word can be a lifeline cast when you’re barely keeping your head above water. A kind word in your worst moment can provide the strength to make it through the end of the day, and that is no small gift.