Oh, Pro Moms. What a special breed. A group of women so headstrong and organized, they could easily have run Fortune 500 companies, but have elected to invest said energy into the (equally important!) task that is child rearing. They read the books, they listen to the podcasts, they buy the Montessori kits, they eliminate all traces of chemicals from their households and spend nights researching preschools that are most likely to catapult their peanut-size bundles of joy to Harvard. Mommy and Me is the equivalent to their weekly industry Happy Hour, the place they go to cross-reference integral developmental milestones, such as how many inches their baby can crawls in a two-minute time period. Here are some of the things I always secretly fantasized about saying to them.
“I didn’t sleep train.” (Lie.) Nothing is more triggering to Pro Moms than sleep training, which, in recent years, has become an industry in of itself, complete with Ferber methods and feng shui nursery gurus and 500 dollar mom shrinks masquerading as “sleep therapists.” (Tip: get yourself a fellow Pro Mom friend who pays for one and bombard them with questions). And yet, no matter how much money you spend to be reassured that letting your kid cry it out for a couple of nights won’t ruin their lifelong psychological and emotional well-being, there’s always a part of you that is convinced that you will. Hearing a fellow mother tell you that she selflessly forwent said practice at the expense of her own sanity is a stage 10 trigger.