Mayim Bialik Reveals She ‘Left in Tears’ After First Group Meeting with ‘Competitive Moms’
Mayim Bialik doesn’t have fond memories of her past experiences with “competitive” moms.
On Thursday, The Big Bang Theory star — who shares sons Frederick, 9, and Miles, 12, with ex Michael Stone — revealed that when she was a new mom for the first time, she left a group meeting “in tears” because the other moms in attendance had been so competitive with each other.
“I instantly felt out of place,” Bialik, 42, said in a video posted on Facebook and Youtube. “I used cloth diapers, I didn’t use pacifiers or bottles. I didn’t have fancy clothes — neither did my baby — I didn’t have a manicure. I mean I barely had time to shower, how was I going to get a manicure?”
The actress added that the “women at this mom’s group were encouraged to brag” about every aspect of motherhood. “How fast their labor was, how precocious their babies were with pooping, rolling over, sitting up, smiling … everything was a competition.”
“These were not my people,” she said before noting that she “never went to any such mom’s group again.”
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The mother-of-two went on to say that what she witnessed that day was “not unusual at all.”
“I would say it’s the norm,” she added. “It’s a pattern of mothering and being which I’ve noticed is steadily increasing in my lifetime as a mom and as an empowered woman.”
But Bialik has a theory for why moms are so competitive.
“I think that competition comes about because we are the first generation of women who were raised after the revolutionary turmoil of the women’s movement, and we are the first generation who was constitutionally raised to believe that we can and should do it all,” she said.
“But being raised this way actually prepares us best to compete in the work place,” she added. “And so when this generation and removed ourselves from the career work, we took that competitive drive and we seem to have superimposed it on our lives as mothers. So It’s not enough to be a mom, you have to be the best mom.”
Bialik then urged mothers to join her in trying to “find more meaningful things to connect about.”
“And if you ask someone, did you breastfeed, it shouldn’t be assumed that you’re asking because you want to pass judgement on them, it should be because you sincerely want to know, how did you choose to feed your baby and what was that like?” she continued.
“We can only do this together — moms, are you with me?” she asked.