Judged.
Have you ever had a friend you respected, whose life choices you admired because you could never do as she did – quit her job, be a full-time mom, not have any help at all, and still maintain a semblance of sanity? Well, I did. This friend of mine was all those things. OK, perhaps “friend” is the wrong word to describe my relationship with this woman; after all, I only met her twice or thrice, and we were more acquaintances than friends in the typical sense of the word. Anyway, I lost touch with this person for a few years, only to rediscover her again about one or two years ago when I stumbled across her blog.
Boy, has she changed. From a mom of one, two, then three, she is now a mother of enough children to form her very own netball team. She’s still a full-time mom, still does not have help, but unfortunately seems to have descended into the depths of Christian fundamentalism. She denigrates the choices of mothers who are all the things she’s not – the mothers who work; the mothers who have help; the mothers who once in a while spoil themselves with It bags; the mothers who ask their maids to take the children to the playground so that they can catch some much-needed me-time. In short, every mother who is not her falls short. And let’s not even talk about the mothers who choose to limit the number of children they have through birth control. No, when mothers like me get to the Pearly Gates, we’ll have a lot of accounting to do.
Whatever happened to “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” – Matthew 7:1-3.
It’s people like these who give Christianity a bad name.