The Parts of Motherhood We Don’t Talk About Enough

There are things we’re allowed to say about motherhood.

I love my child more than I knew was possible.
I’m so grateful.
It goes by so fast.

Those things can be completely true, and they’re not the whole truth.

You can love your child fiercely, and miss your old life. You can want closeness, and desperately need space. You can be grateful for your family, and grieve parts of yourself that feel harder to find now.

You can even think, I wanted this, so why do I sometimes want to get away from it?

More than 25 years ago, Susan Maushart wrote about what she called The Mask of Motherhood: the pressure to present motherhood as more manageable, fulfilling, and natural than it may actually feel.

Some of the book’s ideas about gender and family reflect the time in which it was written. Motherhood happens across many kinds of families, and the experience is shaped by race, culture, class, disability, fertility, family structure, identity, and access to support. Motherhood also doesn’t belong exclusively to cisgender women. Trans and nonbinary people may mother or experience many of the same expectations and transformations, whether or not mother is the word they use for themselves.

Still, Maushart’s central observation feels remarkably current:

When we’re only shown the acceptable parts of motherhood, everything else can start to feel like personal failure.

There’s enormous pressure in dominant Western culture to be grateful, patient, nurturing, emotionally available, and fulfilled by motherhood, even when the actual experience is far more complicated.

Love can coexist with anger. Meaning with monotony. Gratitude with resentment. The wish to hold someone close with the wish for everyone to please stop touching you for five minutes.

None of that makes the love less real.

Yet when nobody talks about these parts, each person can feel like they’re the only one experiencing them.

If everyone else appears to be handling motherhood better than you are, an incredibly demanding human experience can start to look like your individual inability to cope.

And sometimes the problem isn’t your ability to cope at all.

Sometimes you’re exhausted because you’re doing an exhausting amount of work. You’re resentful because the division of labor isn’t fair. You need a break because human beings need breaks. You’re lonely because you need more connection and support.

We need to be careful not to turn every struggle of motherhood into an individual psychological problem.

Maybe honesty about motherhood doesn’t require deciding whether motherhood is beautiful or hard.

It can be both.

And so much more.

Telling the whole story doesn’t diminish motherhood, it makes room for the full humanity of the people living it.

Because sometimes the feeling isn’t the problem.

Sometimes the shame comes from being taught that having these feelings mean something is wrong with you.