The Myth of “Mom” Competence

(Mompetence?)

When I venture into the public sphere accompanied by my baby, it is clear that people view me as a person who knows how to do stuff. As a solo woman, I could be any old asshole. As a Mom, I am an adult. Accessorizing with a child (while female) is a shortcut to appearing like someone who has their shit together. My shit, reader, is not together. 

I recently found myself nodding along to this great article about how motherhood is not a transformative experience – it’s something I spoke about on our podcast when we discussed our first year of co-parenting. Not only am I NOT magically a “better” person , I'm also NOT more competent. I’m truly as much a dumbass as I ever was.

Last week we were having a backyard cookout for the 4th, and our friend went to fetch something from the kitchen. Andrew – baby balanced on one knee – called out “can you grab the bottle out of the fridge while you’re in there?” and I added “yes please, I could use a top up!” Not realizing that he meant the BABY’S bottle, while I (obviously) meant the open Vinho Verde. 

Flying alone with a kid is another, heightened example. Airports are places where the core of the psyche is stripped bare, and your fellow human animal is revealed for its shocking lack of body awareness and spatial reasoning. Normally I do pretty well with airport logistics as a result of my crushing anxiety about missing a flight. This time, I hit a baby-sized snag.

The agent watched me fumble around for a while and sighed audibly. The stroller was already getting a pat-down on the other side of the barriers as I juggled a comic number of things including my non-ambulatory baby. I groped around in vain for the cap to the milk bottle, opening approximately 73 of the 148 zippered compartments in our stupid diaper bag backpack. In the process my child freed a few wipes from an open compartment, flinging them with shrieking glee like wet confetti. My phone and one of my earbuds clattered to the floor. “Ma’am? Come on.” The agent looked at me with undisguised contempt. It’s a look that said, is this woman some kind of rube who’s never been in an airport? It said, how can she possibly not know how to operate her own backpack or how to carry her own child?  My gall rose. If anyone’s going to be contemptuous in an airport security line, it’s ME, buddy. (Have you seen all these idiots? Have you seen you?)

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?? I wanted to yell. I didn’t mean it in a Real Housewife yowling at a Hamptons police officer kind of way. What I mean is: I am a person who chronically under-packs for vacation, handwashing my panties to make it through the week. I am a person who, when the security agent asks me if I’m SURE my pockets are completely empty, forgets the inner breast pocket of my jacket, whose contents are: a linty tube of chapstick, one packet of Cholula hot sauce, and a single-use vial of personal lubricant. I am a person who forgets to pee at the restaurant before getting in the cab to the airport, and when a traffic jam snarls the Lincoln Tunnel, desperately googles “penalty fee for urinating in Uber” and wonders whether it might help to purposefully pee just a little to relieve the pressure (it’s $150, and no, I didn’t). 

Is the person I’ve just described to you likely to know what fucking compartment everything is for in this space-age diaper bag? I do not have a packing spreadsheet. I did not do the math on what time lunch will be in our starting/ending time zone. I am not a “relaxed traveler.”  Sir.

Dukes up, suckers

On the flip side: am I here a highly generous 2.5 hours early? Yes. But that has nothing to do with being a “Mom,” and everything to do with fifteen years as a New York City producer. I’ve assembled and stage-managed entire productions that make this flat-footed TSA line full of shambling zombies look like the Bolshoi ballet corp. I’ve wrangled A-list celebrities whose emotional maturity truly pales in comparison to that of my infant son. My motherhood has nothing to do with my sick obsession with airport timeliness or even my acuity for dodging a 1-year-old's behavioral minefields. I can assure you that I produce the hell out of a vacation, and Act 1, Scene 1 of Summer Travel 2024 includes ample time for sit-down breakfast tacos at the airport Chili’s.

But what I actually do is glare back at this man and his rent-a-cop undercut, and slink through security, vaguely embarrassed. As I lumber the miles-long walk to my gate, I’m a pack mule laden with luggage and a stroller, freshly aware that people I pass must view me as an adult woman with a Parenting System – because of course in the past I’ve always, on some level, assumed that people with kids were women who had figured their lives out…at least more so than I. These seemed like people who were older, wiser, and financially stable. These were people who had a time table and a well-crafted plan for their day. It didn’t even occur to me that this assumption of competence was often gendered around a sexist notion that women just “know” how to do stuff when it comes to their own kids.

Now, I’m the “adult” in charge. I don’t feel any magically different than my child-free, 37-year-old self from last year, though. In some ways a stone cold killer, in some ways a bumbling clown.

The thing about the myth of mom competence is that I don’t necessarily WANT to get more competent at it, or be an “expert” in this. I don’t want to be good at it because I’m not sure being a parent is something you can be “good at.” Can you “be good at” simply being a human being in the world? Can you be an expert at it? 

I settled into my tacos and let my blood pressure tick downward (my child, by the way, is straight chilling this entire time, perhaps inured to my fits of introspection already by this point in life). It’s fine, everything’s fine. We are all just out here, living the shared human experience: trying to get through airport security without having a nervous breakdown. We’re gonna make it to where we’re going. ✌🏾