I’ve noticed sometimes that the things I share most about motherhood on social media are negative. There was a meme I saw on Instagram that talked about the pros and cons of making kids — the pros were “making,” while the cons were the “kids.” I laughed… and then I felt terrible. And then wondered if I should feel terrible.
Motherhood is so hard. That’s the reality. I know, you know it, every mom everywhere knows it. And these silly little memes are our weird way of coping. It’s the mom version of gallows humor that I heard from my husband so often while he was in the Marine Corps. It’s our way of getting by, right? You laugh at how hard things are because it helps you not go completely insane.
So why do I feel guilty?
I realized something after thinking about it for a while: complaining about motherhood doesn’t mean that I don’t love my kids, or that I hate being a mom. I don’t hate being a mom; I love it. It’s the most valuable, rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. But it’s just so hard. I don’t think any of us are ever really prepared for just how hard it’s going to be, or how isolating it will be, or how stressful it is. I had this image of the kind of mom I would be in my head: laidback, happy, fun, easygoing. The reality has been pretty different, let’s be honest.
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I wish sometimes that I could be That Mom more often, that I wouldn’t be laughing at memes about how terrible my kids are or snickering about how motherhood has turned my car into a dumpster-on-wheels that somehow never stays clean, no matter how much we scrub it. I love my kids, more than life itself, but God, the actual mom part is so damn hard.
And you know what? I really believe that part of the problem is that being a mom has become a solo act. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but that whole “it takes a village” mindset seems to be gone. There is so little community, right? Moms are expected to do everything, be everything, for everyone, and do it completely on their own. There’s no one there to help, so not only do we have all the stresses and burden of non-stop parenting, but we do it all alone. We live in a world that expects so much from us, and maybe it’s always been this way, but it feels like this is new, this endless Super-Mom standard.
So maybe, when we’re complaining about motherhood and all the crap it entails, it’s not our kids or being a mom that is the problem. It’s the constant pressure of perfection that is pushed onto us. If a little gallows humor helps get us through the day, then there’s nothing wrong with that.
