If "intentional mediocrity is a sin . . . "
I don't want to be saved
I’m an oldest sister, and in some ways I’m a stereotypical oldest sister. I feel a certain level of maternal responsibility towards my siblings, I’m very keen on family togetherness, I have historically shouldered an unreasonable amount of emotional labor, and I’m sorry to say I relate to this video. But in many other ways, my younger sister is more of a stereotypical oldest sister. She researches restaurants (and makes reservations!), she is in charge of travel coordination, she will make actual phone calls to get shit done. She knows how to create a spreadsheet, and she is very keen on menu planning.
My sister and I grew up in close proximity to our cousins, two of whom are similarly wired sisters. One of them takes care of bizness, the other shows up when she’s told to. One of them is beautifully pulled together at all times, the other has a “capsule wardrobe” that looks a lot like mine. Anyway, throughout the years, Phoebe (my fellow sweatshirt queen) and I have really leaned into our status as JV players within our foursome. We are good at fun vibes, empathy, making asshole comments that make people laugh, but bad at planning and taking the initiative to call Ubers, and it’s much simpler for everyone involved if we all stay in our lanes and stick to our strengths. To be JV is to embrace one’s mediocrity while also being clear about what one can offer. It’s deliberately opting out of what you suck at/dislike and opting in to what you’re good at/enjoy.
The JV lifestyle is all about ease, about comfort, about shortcuts, about doing the bare minimum and still reaping the maximum amount of joy. It’s about being good but not great, about doing well, but not the best. It’s about giving less shits about details and more shits about critical factors like, oh, PEOPLE. Because ultimately, striving depletes those of us wired as JV players; it robs us of peace, wellbeing, and connection.
It’s not at all surprising to me that I didn’t recognize my inner JV status until after kids, that it wasn’t until I became a mother that I truly recognized the beauty of mediocrity. Because if there’s anything the onset of motherhood forces you to confront: it’s your relationship to striving and optimization.
As a pregnant person, I did nothing but strive. I read the books. I Pinterested the ideal nursery. I ate something called a “pregnancy salad.” I signed up for prenatal yoga. I wrote letters to my future baby.
As a new mother, I continued to strive. I agonized about tummy time. I ordered mobiles according to ideal eyesight development. I wondered if I was talking to my infant enough for his language development. I bemoaned the fact that my baby wouldn’t sleep flat on his back in a crib. When he smiled his “first smile” a week late, I felt sure I had fucked something up.
And then of course there were the playdate and preschool comparisons. Little Emma babbling before my baby. Little Forrest learning his colors before my baby. Little Mia saying please more regularly than my toddler. Little Emerson graduating from parallel play before my kid. Little Milo reaching for red pepper slices instead of Cheezits. It’s not lost on me that I perceived individual children (did you know children are also people?!) as walking (or crawling) proof of someone else’s mothering capabilities. New motherhood really fucks with your sense of perspective.
It took years and years and years for me to understand that I am happier and better as a mother when I strive less, and that my kids are happier and better as kids if they’re not parented by a mother exhausted by her efforts to attain excellence.
Which is why messages like this trouble me.
In the above reel, momfluencer Brooke explains how she seeks greatness as a mother.
In her typical day, she does the following:
Wakes up when it’s still dark out to go for a run AND do strength-training upon her return. I believe this counts as two workouts before anyone else in her family is even awake.
Still in her exercise gear, she reads to her toddler on the floor. I can only imagine the discomfort of the sweaty sports bra.
Then she showers, applies makeup with care, chooses an outfit (again, with care), and styles her hair (yes, with care).
She and her toddler eat breakfast and the breakfast is not cereal.
Next, it’s time to home school her three older kids. EASY AND SIMPLE.
Then it’s time to play joyously and energetically outside with her kids. Fear not, she has a reel about maximizing, nay, creating, energy too.
For some downtime, she continues her efforts to be the very best she can be by reading this self-help book. She takes notes.
Perhaps to record her notes, she sits on the floor to work on her laptop while also eating.
Brooke’s central message is that “intentional mediocrity is a sin.” She explains that “when I’m not maximizing my potential, I’m not solving the problems I’ve been created to solve.”
While I won’t get into the sinfulness of it all, I will very much get into the idea that mothers are “created” to “solve problems.” THIS IS NOT HOW I SELF-IDENTIFY. While I don’t love the idea that anyone is created explicitly for anything (can we just, like, live?), I especially hate this particular rendition, which flattens all mommies into do-ers, task-completers, tools of optimization, and shadows the reality that in fact, we’re all people (just like toddlers!!!), a truth that continues to bear repeating!
Brooke’s argument that good mothering is synonymous with intensive mothering is not new. In their 2005 book, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and how it has Undermined All Women, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels define our cultural obsession with maximized motherhood as “the new momism,” which demands not only that a good mother act as primary caregiver to her children, but that she devote 100% of herself into relentlessly striving to self-improvement. Douglas and Michaels’ description of a “good mom” will likely to be familiar to anyone mothering in the age of Instagram.
Now, if you were a "good" mom, you'd joyfully empty the shopping bags and transform the process of putting the groceries away into a fun game your kids love to play (upbeat Raffi songs would provide a lilting soundtrack). Then, while you steamed the broccoli and poached the chicken breasts in Vouvray and Evian water, you and the kids would also be doing jigsaw puzzles in the shape of the United Arab Emirates so they learned some geography. Your cheerful teenager would say, "Gee, Mom, you gave me the best advice on that last homework assignment." When your husband arrives, he is so overcome with admiration for how well you do it all that he looks lovingly into your eyes, kisses you, and presents you with a diamond anniversary bracelet. He then announces that he has gone on flex time for the next two years so that he can split child-care duties with you fifty-fifty. The children, chattering away happily, help set the table, and then eat their broccoli. After dinner, you all go out and stencil the driveway with autumn leaves.
It’s the stenciling the driveway with autumn leaves for me!!!!!
In The Mommy Myth, Douglas and Michaels point out that the new momism coopts feminist ideology about autonomy, agency, and choice when in fact it has more in common with the 19th century Cult of Domesticity and June Cleaver ideals than anything else. After all, central to the new momism is the underlying belief that to be a mother is 1) the best and only thing a good woman should be, 2) there is only one way to be a good mother, and that is through discipline, self-sacrifice, and never-ending effort, and 3) a good mother is a mother who doesn’t need or want help. The new momism is not particularly interested in intersectionality or how it relates to mothers’ pursuit (or not) of excellence.
In a culture that doesn’t take the labor of mothering seriously (illustrated through lack of respect for care work, remuneration for care work, or cultural safety nets to support care workers!), I understand why folks gravitate to Brooke’s account, because its distinguishing characteristic is that she takes motherhood and mothering very seriously indeed. So much so that she’s even written about her practice of numbing herself to DISCOMFORT as a way to strengthen her mothering muscles, which
wrote about here. I stand with Jo when I say yeah no thank you!My cousin is due with her first baby in January and has been suffering from pretty debilitating leg/foot swelling, which has been exacerbated by the fact that her job requires her to be on her feet for large portions of the day. She asked her doctor for a note to allow her to work from home, and her doctor REFUSED, explaining that leg and foot swelling is a “normal symptom of pregnancy.” Suffering in the name of motherhood should not be glibly normalized (related: going to Walmart by oneself is not a replacement for therapy!!!!!!) but if a symptom that causes pain, discomfort, and distress IS NORMAL, perhaps it should also be normal to do everything we can as a society to help alleviate that pain, discomfort, and distress?
Aside from the glaring fact that adopting a hustle and grind approach to motherhood is toxic and places undue emphasis on optimizing the insular nuclear family unit at the expense of the collective, I object to the notion that a life well lived must be a life lived to its fullest potential. I object to the idea that a successful life is one lived in accordance to a meticulously crafted daily planner in which every hour is accounted for.
There are lots of things I could probably achieve if I tried. There are lots of things we all could achieve if we tried! But it’s often in the absence of effort that people do the most experiencing, learning, feeling - living.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes about the intersection of the attention economy, the cult of productivity, and the climate crisis. She interrogates the meaning of usefulness by sharing a parable written by ancient philosopher Zhuang Zhou about a tree that lives to an advanced age simply because its wood was deemed unfit for lumber by a carpenter. The tree appears to the carpenter in a dream and points out that was useless for the carpenter (bad wood for lumber) was quite useful for allowing the tree to live a long life.
When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder.
If mothers approach multitasking like an Olympic event, if we’re doing the absolute most at all times, what happens to our experience of those times? Does it factor in at all? What if “intentional mediocrity” is not a sin, but a form of resistance? A deliberate holding onto the spaces in between the constant action of mothering.
There is nothing wrong with creating systems and employing strategies to make one’s life easier as a mother. Most of us need all the help we can get! But doing less is also a strategy. Today’s culture of intensive mothering tricks us all into the illusion that busyness is goodness, that in order to give our children supportive, loving, warm upbringings, we must supersede all reasonable expectations, that we must become all manner of experts. This not only places absurd pressure on individual mothers, it belies the importance of community, and it deprives children from learning from a variety of people with a variety of strengths, perspectives, and backgrounds.
In an interview with
on about her book All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Way We Strive, author Rainesford Stauffer reflects on her own fraught past of constant effort.Now, I can see a connection between what I considered being ambitious (or hard working) and what was actually about feeling in control . . . It wasn’t all bluster. I really did love a lot of the work. But it was so hollow because the focus on doing, doing, doing let me skim over why I was trying to prove myself. To mask shame. To earn self-worth. To find a way to forgive myself for everything I wasn’t, honestly.
Largely because mothers have been disenfranchised in the U.S. and deprived of meaningful systemic support, it makes sense that many of us long for a sense of control. We can’t individually control the burning of our planet, the safety of our schools, the prohibitive cost of childcare, our incomprehensive maternal healthcare, or inequity in the workplace. But we can trick ourselves into feeling more in control if we don’t stand still for long enough to think too deeply about the everyday horrors of mothering in America. And shame! Oh the SHAME that is both heaped upon mothers from external sources and the shame which most of us are trained to heap upon ourselves! I deeply empathize with the knee-jerk instinct to plan one’s way out of pain, to cram one’s hour full to brimming if only to avoid the difficulty of processing shame and allowing oneself a little grace. Grace is hard. Color-coded chore charts might seem easier.
‘Tis the season of peak maternal excellence, in which moms are expected to cook delicious meals, create core memories, choose perfectly curated gifts, foster familial bliss, and of course, above all, ensconce our children in magic. Now is EXACTLY the right time to consider a form of magic that doesn’t necessitate elves on shelves or realistically gnawed carrot tips. Consider instead, the life-changing magic of mediocrity.
In the spirit of living my truth, here are some ways in which I let my mediocre flag fly on the reg so I can live a life that’s maximized for pleasure, ease, joy, and community.