How Do We Know We Are Doing It Right?

Deep down I really do know I am the best mother for her. It should be enough, shouldn’t it? Even though my breasts are tiny.

I know better than to compare myself to women online, yet I still do it. I must confess it triggers me seeing other moms in their perfect clean houses with their hair and make up done, cooking in their perfectly stocked kitchens, with their breastfed newborns happily playing on beautiful beige playmats. Part of this stems from the fact that I’ve been wearing the same sweatpants and milk-stained bras for weeks now, which is entirely my problem, not cooking as much as I’d like, barely exercising and—most importantly—failing at breastfeeding. Bean is in the middle of a horrendous breast aversion, and I don’t quite know what to do.

We live in a time where visibility is constant. We are surrounded by glimpses of other people’s lives that, whether intentional or not, demand comparison. I have to actively remind myself that just because something is visible does not mean it has meaning for me. Comparison is a thief of joy, yada, yada, yada. It’s not inherently malicious—it’s our brain scanning the environment for cues of where we stand. The problem arises only when meaning is attached.

I don’t want to dismiss what’s online as fake or curated—sometimes it’s very real. Some women do keep immaculate homes. Some wake up early, put on makeup, and step into the day polished. I don’t like conversation around relatability either. What’s relatable to me is not necessarily relatable to you and vice versa. We all have different baseline of desires, finances and energy levels, so talking about it like there is some universal measurer is a moot point. Someone having a clean house is not an attack on my house being messy, and a mother of a newborn curling her hair is not curling it to make me feel bad about just brushing mine, at least I think she doesn’t. She is certainly not breastfeeding her child to say that I am a shitty mom for not being able to breastfeed mine.

When I confuse the two, I realised, I outsource my sense of adequacy. But if I resist, I can acknowledge her reality while keeping hold of my own. This is not easy, especially when you are guided by postpartum hormons. It requires practicing a kind of monk-like detachment: seeing without absorbing and noticing without internalising.

Of course, comparison was always there, one way or another, but it is especially prominent now that I have a child.

Am I playing with her enough? I think so, but mothers online seem to do it more. Am I doing enough to make her like the pram? No. I see other children hang in their strollers happily and calmly. What am I doing wrong? Am I a bad mother for not being able to pump enough milk? I am not, but it certainly feels this way. And so on, and so forth.

Comparison is not going away. Our minds will always measure, always scan, always categorize. What I can do is choose what to do with the information once it arrives. I can let it bruise me, or I can let it pass through, without resenting the other mother or resenting myself.

Trying out a football hold as per Reddit’s advise. Worked for about 2 minutes!

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I often wonder if there is any moment in mothering where certainty arrives—something absolute, beyond doubt, beyond guesswork. Right now raising a child feels more like walking through a fog with a compass that keeps spinning. You move forward anyway, guided by instinct, love, and a kind of desperate hope that the choices you make now will someday translate into resilience, health, kindness, and joy in the person you are raising. And she is still a newborn, so the only doubts I have are if she is eating enough, sleeping enough, if she is healthy enough and happy enough. I can’t even imagine how much more complicated it will get from here—I want to spoil my daughter rotten but I don’t want to raise a dickhead.

The real answer, I suspect, won’t arrive until much later. Parenting is a long game, one where the results are revealed slowly, almost imperceptibly. We may not know for years whether we chose wisely in the ways we disciplined, nourished, encouraged, or let go. And even then, our children will carry both our successes and our mistakes with them. Will she resent me forever for giving her a breast aversion? Will it mess up her health? Emily Oster thinks it won’t, and I chose to believe her.¹

Deep down I really do know I am the best mother for her. It should be enough, shouldn’t it? Even though my breasts are tiny.

I realise the majority of my doubts come from hormonal overwhelm but even that knowledge doesn’t make them go away. It will probably take time. I look at Bean’s cheeky smile, her soft round body, her ocean-deep eyes and feel up with a kind of uncontrollable tenderness. I want to give her the world. I don’t want to fail her. How can I do it when I can’t even give her milk? You see how postpartum brain works?

Through the blur, I wondered if I was alone or if other parents felt the same way I did - that everything involving our children was painful in some way. The emotions, whether they were joy, sorrow, love or pride, were so deep and sharp that in the end they left you raw, exposed and yes, in pain. The human heart was not designed to beat outside the human body and yet, each child represented just that - a parent’s heart bared, beating forever outside its chest.

― Debra Ginsberg

I want to raise a child who knows she is deeply loved, who trusts that home is a place where she can always return, who is brave and happy and loving, rebellious and audacious. I believe I can do it, milk or no milk.

1. Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool by Emily Oster