Great Advice from God's Little Petunia

By Katharine Grubb

This is the best advice I have ever received. If you can master it, it will save you much, much heartache. 

It is this: Do not compare yourself to others.

This is super-hard advice to follow. We're insecure. We often, as parents, don't know what we're doing. We have a natural tendency to look to our right and to our left and see what that other Mom is doing with her kids, and then we scramble to do it to, thinking that this will ease our insecurity. Sometimes it does. More often, though, it doesn't. So, we look somewhere else. 

Putting advice out there is risky. There’s always the possibility that it won’t work for you, and you’ll feel worse about yourself. Instead, I'm hoping that you take little bits, think through them, and know yourself well enough to know what might work and what might not. I'm hoping that you're teachable, right where you are, and not overwhelmed. 

This, I think, is the root of all the Mommy Wars. Certain opinionated mothers who decide that they know better than everyone and they push their ideas, and perhaps even their agendas, on other mothers and guilt ensues. We don't need any help feeling guilty, thank you very much; most of us can get to Guilt Land without any help at all. 

If we compare ourselves to others, then one of two things happens. We either compare our weaknesses to their strength and we come out downhearted. (Katharine bakes ten loaves of bread every Friday!?!? I am such a loser!)  Or, we compare our strength to their weaknesses and we come out smug. (She doesn't scrapbook! How will she remember her precious memories? She is REALLY going to regret that someday. Pass the glue and the crazy scissors!) 

The healthiest option is to value each other, and ourselves, as unique, with strengths and weaknesses from which we can encourage each other. How can you have a sister fourteen months apart from you and not compare? So, I tell my two tween daughters this: that one of them is a rose and one of them is a lily, both very beautiful, both very different, both a valuable addition to our garden. 

I see all of you mothers in the same way. One of you is an orchid, one is a peony, one is a rhododendron, one is an iris. Each of you has specific needs, specific qualities and specific beauty that is put in our group for a reason. None is valued any more or any less than the others. And so, as you go back home to your little gardens, you'll raise little flowers just like you, not like me, and not like mine. 

This is what God intended all along. It makes the world beautiful.