A Tale Of Two Women

I was in between the bath and bedtime shuffle tonight when the kids were occupied for a nanosecond or two, so I checked my Instagram account.

I noticed a woman who just started to follow me, because the scarf around her head stood out. Her profile said she was a momma from Boston, and that she enjoyed cooking, sewing, and Physics. Many of the comments were in Arabic even though her posts were in fluent but sweetly botched English. As I clicked around the squares that represent this woman’s life, I saw the meals she made, her trips out grocery shopping, the funny things her kids did, the comments in Arabic about the funny things her kids did but filled with emoticons that explained it all and made me laugh out loud. My favorite captions were “the best part of having a baby is that you are surrounded by lots of cute heart-melting stuffs” under a tiny pair of boots, and under a little frog potty “only God knows how many hours a day I spend sitting in front of this cute little frog singing and entertaining Mahta!”

Could there be a more relatable moment for all the mothers on Earth?

Each 612 x 612 pixel window pane into her life was so similar to my own Instagram account. I saw the way that you could super-impose her life on mine. The one standout was her ability to sew impossibly cute clothing for herself and her daughter, which amazed me because I can barely sew a button. If she gets a Pintrest account, she could definitely make us all feel inferior about our sewing skills, but she seems too nice to do that. This woman’s life was so lovely, filled with affection for her meals, her baked goods, the things she made with her hands, and most of all her husband and children. There were no selfies.

The very next thing I viewed on Instagram was the account of a celebrity. I am not sure how I even got to it but I follow a lot of food sites and I think she made something they shared. I won’t name her but I will say that she is a model married to John Legend and has been on the cover of Sports Illustrated. And as I viewed the window panes into her life, I cringed. In every other picture she was half-naked, especially when she was hanging out with her model friends. There were boobs and butts and slits everywhere. Her captions included a lot of swear words, which would have actually worked for me on a post or two but by the fifth I was just like, wow, you reallllly like the F word. Her captions read things like “I have a manager because I am famous!!!”, “Thank you for making me look so beautiful!!” and “I can’t think of anything to type in this box” under what was obviously her trying to show off being around a lot of famous people (if you guessed the Kardashian-Wests were in the picture, you might be right). Was she being sarcastic? Maybe. Did she sound annoying? Definitely. This woman’s life was filled with affection for…herself. And other famous people. And her mom. And there sure were a lot of selfies.

There is probably a lot of bias on my part since I am in fact a mom and not a super model. And it is easy to knock celebrities. In her comments I read people making fun of her forehead. Her forehead. She is a super model. It seems like making negative comments about her appearance is really misguided energy. And I probably would’ve kept scrolling, letting the images in one eye and out the other any other time. But seeing the two women back to back made me think. About our lives and how we spend them. How we represent what we love. And it made me realize that social media, while a definite time waster, is not the devil. It can be a beautiful window pane letting us intimitely peer into worlds we would never be able too. But it can also be the pool that our friend Narcissis stared into. And this woman that the world considers beautiful and has millions of followers seemed very ugly to me. While this other woman that the world doesn’t know at all had 59 followers touched me at my core with her love and sweetness.

Thank you, Mahshid. For teaching me that beauty is more then 612 pixels deep.