Why can't we all just get along?

I've been a Mom for about 21 months now. Even before I became a Mom, I had some issues with other Mommies. Since becoming a Mom, my wariness about the Mommy World hasn't abated much.
It's a competition. I always thought that while I was working that it was a lot like high school (the guys bragging about the booty they didn't get, the size of their paychecks and the chicks all competiting for the same job du jour that rocked). But the Mommy World is a lot like junior high school. Everyone is trying to be teacher's pet at playgroups and trying to prove they have the cooler clothes (for themselves or the kids).
But there are some competiting Mommies I can actively avoid in my life. Like the privileged ones living five minutes from us.
We live one community away from two very wealthy communities where the CEOs, CFOs, CXOs all seem to live. A few years ago, I remember reading in the San Francisco Chronicle magazine about how the trend in one of the communities was that the wives of these CblankOs who had held positions of importance before dedicating themselves to Home Life (because you know that's how they think about it) were feeling bereft of the thrill of competition or whatever they did before they married. So they found a new way to compete.
By procreating. By having child after child. By filling their McMansions with the sound of children. Little Monet is two? Time to squeeze out another child? They got to look upon their progeny with a sense of pride as they took them off to dressage class because they were able to pop out the most amazing child. They are stay at home Mommies who can be with Monet, Hunter, Azure and Bond unlike those other Mommies who work and leave their kids in daycare.
Let's try not to notice that their five kids all looked mostly to Esperanza, Carmen and Paloma, their Latin American nannies who spent time with them, rather than Mommy who is taking pictures with her Nikon digital SLR to post to the website when they got home.
Last summer, Husband and I had dinner downtown. Afterwards, we took Boy for a walk downtown before having a nice ice cream before heading home for Boy's bath and bed time. We sat at a table near another couple who were having sundaes with a friend and their nearly newborn son. They chatted with us and we with them about how wonderful our offspring were.
Then came the hammer blow.
"So, does your son like daycare?," she asked me.
"We're fortunate enough for me to be a stay at home Mom," I replied.
The horror struck look that I had heard a comedian call the "turd under the nose" look. Uh oh. Land mine!
"Don't you worry that your son is going to be unable to function socially? He won't be having that interaction that he needs to be able to be around others!"
I tried to tell her that I didn't go to preschool and managed to be the belle of kindergarten without a problem but she was bullet training her way through her defense of being a working Mom. She wasn't sure how we in the sticks (she was from The City - San Francisco) did it because it was clearly less expensive to live here compared to life in the Right Neighbourhood in The City but she had to work. Her son was in the best day care that she could find and she knew he was going to be socially well adjusted.
Of course, she also added that he was four months old and fighting his third ear infection. In spite of her assurances that she was doing the right thing and I was clearly doing the wrong thing (she also had to add that I was sending a bad message to Boy about my not going out and being hammer and tongs with the rest of work world), Husband and I felt like she was trying to reassure herself and her husband that she was doing the right thing. That going back to her job to pay for their big Victorian in The City, their Mercedes SUV and 7 series BMW and other accoutrements of rank was the right thing.
It's not the first time I've heard this. It won't be the last. It's only lately that Boy's Gymboree class has stopped being filled primarily with nannies with children and Mommies with children.
I'm not saying that being a stay at home Mom is better than being a working outside of the house Mom. I'll tackle that topic later. But it's as if women can't stop competing. As if there is only one solution to every single thing and they clearly have it.
We have acquaintances who made it abundantly clearly before Boy was born that we had screwed up in a huge way. Fiona came over to our house with her husband Marc a couple of days after we had bought Boy's stroller and car seat (and two months before Boy's birth) for a visit. They were two hours late because they had decided to go buy a new SUV that day (the Right SUV) and budget an hour for the process rather than four. When they arrived, they brought in their six month old son and plopped his baby bucket car seat onto the floor while he snoozed quietly and wanted to see our baby gear.
The bedroom was freshly painted, the IKEA furniture assembled and on the Mondrian like area rug in the room. I'd put on the walls the pictures that had adorned Husband's walls and my walls as children along with pictures we'd bought for Boy's room. We'd parked the stroller in Boy's room and his new car seat was sitting in the back of my SUV (the Wrong SUV so I had learned). We were rather proud of the fact that we had been able to get everything together two months before Boy's birth.
"Wrong stroller, wrong car seat, wrong, wrong, wrong," Fiona pronounced succinctly.
I was stunned. "Excuse me?"
"What if your child falls asleep in the car? A car seat like ours you just unlatch and carry the baby in without disturbing it."
"But it's not comfortable for the baby to sleep in and besides that, I'm not really a fan of the baby bucket. And my friend the cop said that those things don't always latch back on to their base right."
"If they click, it is attached properly," Fiona said with a sniff of authority.
"My friend said that isn't always the case," I said calmly though I was not feeling it.
"What does your friend know? Do they have a child?," she asked.
"Well, she is a cop who is certified in the proper installation of them but she doesn't have a kid," I said.
"If she had a child, she wouldn't say that," Fiona said.
I refrained from telling Fiona about Renee who had her baby bucket car seatfall out of her car when Renee's daughter was two months old. Exhausted from constant feedings, Renee had put the car seat in with the click sounding but it hadn't really latched. When she stopped at Target to pick up some more diapers, she opened the car door and out tumbled the baby bucket with baby inside. Renee was horrified and rushed her daughter to the pediatrician to make sure she hadn't caused brain damage in her first born.
Renee's second child had a Britax convertible car seat much like Boy has.
Don't even get me started about the competition on what kind of birth method or whether or not you're the biological Mother or an adoptive Mother debates I've stumbled upon. Holy shit. And the breast feeding thing is a land mine field that should have an organization to help defuse it before someone gets killed. Oh and God save me from another Mom who treats her child's food allergies as if they needed to be the toddler in the plastic bubble - or at least, we should all refrain from having anything remotely nut like in our systems lest little Golden breath in the fumes of a peanut butter cookie your kid inhaled before you got to the park. Just make sure little Golden doesn't wander over when I'm giving Boy his graham cracker afternoon snack - which means get off your cell phone so that you can Mom Up and take care of your little gluten sensitive angel instead of expecting me, the Mom who doesn't know you from a hole in the wall - to know that Golden can't have wheat, sugar, or anything with peanuts.
Motherhood should be a sorority. It shouldn't be a competition. We're all Mothers whether the child came through our vaginas, a slit in our abs or through someone else's gift. Being a Mother is challenging, frustration, joyful and one of the toughest jobs on the planet. We should be fighting to get the government to subsidize child care for women who have jobs and women who need a couple of hours each week to be able to pull their shit together.
Let's put down all the books that say there is only one way to do something and remember that all the right answers are only good for some children and not all. Just because little Romena was able to go from bottle to sippy cup at 11 months doesn't mean that every single child can do it without a fight. Just because Nemo sleeps from 730pm to 730am without waking up thanks to that $200 an hour sleep therapist doesn't mean that I haven't read all the same advice you got for $200 an hour and it still made not one iota of a difference to Boy.
Let's all agree that being a Mom really takes a village. Let's watch out for each other's children and each other. Let's all agree that being a Mom is the hardest job you'll ever eventually love. Let's all agree that it's a bitch to juggle raising a child and being a human being. Let's all agree that even with the cell phone stowed into the car while you're at the park, you can't always keep up with a speeding toddler so please, try to make sure my kid doesn't do a header down the steep stair case and I'll make sure your toddler doesn't drown while playing in the fountain.