The Internet Melted My Motherly Common Sense
I started my affair with social media in earnest when I was pregnant with my son. I’m a geek and I needed all the information I could get to make sure I “did it right.” Like the cumulative online knowledge base of every man, woman, and cute cat could collectively provide me with the understanding and power to actually affect fetal development. I was living with my husband, but away from my family and friends, and I’m stubborn. I didn’t want to be the one that needed to call an actual person for help. Online forums, experts, and mums’ groups meant that I could cope, get the info I needed, and never had to admit that it was hard, or that I was clueless.
As someone who’s old enough to remember a time without the Internet, I welcome the way that it has made us instantly connected. There is help and support in an instant, you can get a giggle (or just get off) at the touch of a button or a swipe of your phone. It has provided the pub argument proof of which actor played what and where the capital of Micronesia is. And most of us connectors get the good and the bad. Connectors connect quickly, as it becomes second nature. And talking to real folk stops.
Both personally and professionally, the connections we’ve made have in some cases — and in my case as a mother — become too tight, too restrictive, and too intrusive. Four months into my pregnancy, there was a scan that showed irregular shadows. The geek in me got online. I called my mum, but I stopped trusting that it would be okay when she said it would. I called a friend who was a health visitor. Apparently, my brain down-shifted her professional experience and recommendations in favor of unqualified forums from the other side of the planet. My brave face was a digitized screenshot of my smiling self.
I’m specifically talking about those parenting pages, groups, and forums on social media, where well-meaning (usually) mothers actually end up making us all feel a little shit about not co-sleeping, not breastfeeding our 10-year-old and occasionally (ish) feeding our kids junk.
The pages that you look to for guidance can confuse and conflict with your own common sense and gut feeling of what is the right thing to do. There are women out there who’ve become pseudo-professionals in the childcare field. They seem to stalk the forums chipping in with assertive “fact” and counter-science, turning an innocent query about feeding a four-month-old spinach mush into an assault on why you’re damaging your child’s potential IQ by not breastfeeding indefinitely. I only asked about the bloody spinach.
We’ve dumbed our brains down to the extent that rather than rely on our gut instinct or actually ask another mother, or our mothers (you know, those people we’re actually physically and emotionally connected to) for advice, we think, Whatever, I can Google it. So much so, I once saw a post where a mum had shared a picture of a slightly brown banana and asked other women to tell her whether it was safe to eat. I only hope she was kidding. I suspect not.
With my second pregnancy, I walked away. I disconnected from Google. I divorced the forums and viewed the mums’ groups on Facebook with healthy skepticism. I asked my mum if I was stuck on something and got the answer I should have had in the first place: “Do what you think is best.” I needed to shift my own dialogue to a place where I could hear my own words aloud, and feel the sense in the answer I was given. Pretty soon, the dialogue in my head shifted to self-reliance, to seeking real comfort in other humans, and not the automatic reach for the phone to connect with the Internet before my own common sense.
