Why I Feel Jealous of Other Moms (And Small Realistic Ways I Manage It)
Last Tuesday, I leaned against my dented 2018 minivan at elementary school pickup, crumbs of a peanut butter granola bar sticking to the thigh of my stained sweatpants, waiting for my 7-year-old, Leo. A few feet away, Sarah—room parent, organizer of the fall festival, mom of two—waved me over. She pulled out her phone to show me photos from her family’s weekend camping trip: sun through pine trees, s’mores oozing chocolate, all four of them grinning in matching rain jackets. She’d just told me that morning her older daughter won first place in the district art show.
As I smiled and said how wonderful that all was, I felt a familiar, ugly little twist low in my stomach. I wasn’t happy for her, not right then. I was jealous. Jealous of the matching rain jackets, jealous of the energy to plan a camping trip when I can barely remember to restock toilet paper half the time, jealous that her kids never seem to have public meltdowns in the pickup line.
I drove home with Leo chattering in the backseat about how his friend took his dinosaur eraser, and that twist sat with me. That night, after I got Leo to bed, I folded laundry half-heartedly and scrolled through my Instagram feed while eating leftover mac and cheese straight from the pot. Another mom I know from playgroup posted a reel of her perfectly organized playroom, followed by a clip of her 6-year-old reading aloud a chapter book. I closed the app and stared at the pile of unfolded socks on my couch, at the crayon marks on my wall that I’ve been meaning to paint over for three months, and the jealousy got heavier. I’d never told anyone I felt this way, because isn’t that what you’re not supposed to feel as a mom? We’re supposed to lift each other up, not secretly seethe when someone else’s life looks better than yours.
Two weeks later, I met my friend Lila for coffee after dropoff. Lila has two kids a little older than Leo, and works full time as a nurse. I was complaining about how tired I was, juggling part-time work and school dropoffs and all the little things, and she laughed and said she was jealous of me. Jealous that I get to be there for every class party, that I can pick Leo up early when he has a cold, that I don’t have to miss half his school events because of a shift I can’t swap.
I stared at my coffee. I’d been jealous of Lila for months—jealous of her steady full-time paycheck, jealous that she gets to leave work at work and not check emails while she’s cutting sandwiches, jealous that her kids are older and can tie their own shoes. That conversation flipped something for me. We’d both been looking at the front of each other’s lives, missing the whole back half that no one posts about or talks about at pickup.
After that, I started testing small things to keep the jealousy from taking over, none of them the “just practice self-care” nonsense I see online that doesn’t actually help when that twist is sitting in your gut.
The first thing I do is a one-line fact check, out loud if I’m alone, in my head if I’m around other people. When I feel that jealousy hit, I pull one specific, true fact that I know about the situation that I’m missing. When I was looking at Sarah’s camping photos, the fact I would have pulled is: Sarah’s husband works two weeks on, two weeks off offshore, that was the first full family trip they’ve taken in 10 months, and she told me last month she spent three weeks sleeping on her couch because her 2-year-old wouldn’t stop waking up screaming. It’s not a generic “everyone has struggles” line. It’s a specific thing that reminds me I’m only seeing the 10 seconds of the story she shared, not the whole day.
The second thing I did was make a messy album on my phone. Any time I have one of those chaotic, messy, very ours moments, I take a photo and add it. There’s a photo of Leo covered head to toe in ketchup after a backyard barbecue, a photo of my sink full of unwashed dishes that sat there for two days, a photo of the lopsided birthday cake I made for Leo last year that collapsed halfway through the party. When I’m spiraling comparing my life to someone else’s highlight reel, I open that album instead of scrolling further. It takes 10 seconds, and it yanks me right back to my own life, not the one I think I’m supposed to have.
The third thing I do is say the jealousy out loud, to another mom. Last month, I was at a playdate, and another mom was talking about how her 7-year-old sleeps 12 hours straight every night and never wakes up. Leo still wakes me up at least once a week with bad dreams or a lost stuffed animal. Instead of smiling and nodding and feeling that twist, I just said, “Ugh, I’m low key jealous. I haven’t slept a full 8 hours in 7 years.” She laughed and said she was jealous back, because Leo will eat broccoli and carrots without a fight, and hers won’t eat anything that isn’t beige. Saying it out loud takes the power away from it. It stops being a shameful secret I hide, and becomes just a silly little human feeling.
I still feel jealous sometimes, it doesn’t go away completely. Last week, I got the letter that Leo didn’t get into the gifted program we applied to, and an hour later I saw another mom from class post that her kid got in. That twist was sharp, right there in my chest, for a good five minutes. I did my fact check, opened my messy album, texted Lila and said “I felt jealous today.” She texted back a photo of her kid’s backpack covered in half-chewed gum and said “Me too, I’m jealous anyone can go a whole day without finding gum in their laundry.”
It’s still a work in progress. I don’t think I’ll ever stop having that little twinge sometimes, when someone else’s life looks brighter or easier or better than mine. But these small things keep it from turning into something that takes away from the good parts of my own messy, ketchup-stained, collapsed-cake life. That’s enough for me right now.
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