The good and the bad in motherhood
Before becoming a mother, we are often confronted with the image of the “perfect” mother. She doesn’t look 100% the same for all of us, but encompasses something along the lines of:
being calm with our children, talking in a quiet voice all the time
creating activities for them, to stimulate their brains and their development
cooking healthy foods for them all the time, making sure that they don’t eat too much sugar and that they have the perfect balance of vegetables & proteins every single day
not letting them watch any screens until a certain age and once they are allowed to watch screens, limiting it very strictly according to their age
playing with them and enjoying it
having a clean, nice house and making sure to look well-dressed every day
having a paid job, but not working too many hours in order to spend time with the children and not send them to day care 5 days a week
breastfeeding because breast is best - but not too long or it becomes strange
Very often, as soon as we become mothers, we realise that it’s hard to keep up with these expectations for various reasons. As mothers, we cannot do it all - look after a child, run a household, practice self-care and prioritise our appearance, work in order to move forward with our career, etc.
Conflicting emotions
Unlike what we are being told before becoming mothers, there’s a lot of ambivalence in motherhood, a lot of conflicting emotions. While we love our kids more than anything in the world, this love might not be instant for all of us. We might miss them when we are not with them but also wish for a moment on our own on the days we are home alone with the kids.
As a society, we’ve established that there are “good” and “bad” feelings - that we should embrace the good ones and that we should avoid the bad ones, that we failed if we feel the bad ones. Yet life is filled with a whole range of emotions that are all valid and allowed to be. Just because we are a mother doesn’t mean that we are only allowed to feel the positive emotions and need to feel guilty about any negative emotions that come up.
Two feelings can co-exist - and they often do where children are concerned. For me, spending time with my children - or not spending time with them - is a situation where I regularly notice this. Since becoming a mother, I found being home alone for the whole day with my kids rather overwhelming. My nervous system feels overloaded with the noise that is unpredictable, I’m stressed because I don’t know what to expect from them. It’s gotten easier now that the boys are a bit older, but it is still challenging at times and can send me straight into “fight or flight” mode under certain circumstances. On those days, I often yearn for a moment to myself. The next day when they are at day care. Next weekend, when they’ll be away for two nights with their grandparents. The next time I’m away on a trip on my own.
Yet the moment they leave the house, I start feeling this huge emptiness. I miss the laughter, the sound of kids playing outside, them asking me to read a book or coming to sit on my lap. I feel like a part of me is missing and at times, there’s the guilt of being away from them, of not wanting to spend every waking moment with them, of needing some space and quiet for me.
It takes a village
Does that make me a bad mother? I’d say it makes me human. There’s a reason behind the saying that “it takes a village to raise a child”. A village that we don’t have anymore, because we now live in our own houses with our nuclear family. We might live far away from family and not have any support around. We might think it’s not appropriate to ask our neighbours or friends for support - after all, they also don’t ask us so they seem to be handling it all on their own and we don’t want to seem like a failure by needing help.
I feel lucky that we have a village around us. Our village doesn’t look like the village our parents might have grown up in. It’s a village we created on our own, by talking to people, by trusting them, maybe also through lucky circumstances. It’s a give and take, relationships that were built over time through the kindness and generosity of family and friends, and the trust we put in them to look after our children and the opportunity for them to be in each other’s lives.
It’s that village that has massively supported my mental health.
Can we have it all?
As mothers, we hold so much together. Our family, the household, the mental load. Paid work. A career we might have worked for for many years before having children. As millennial women, we grew up being told that we “can have it all”. The career. The children. The relationship. The home. But the reality is that in the societal structures that we live, where work often means long hours, pressure to produce and being praised for being “stress-resilient”, aren’t compatible with the unpaid labour that mostly women do at home. Creating equality in a relationship after having children is hard work as women still take on a big part of the mental load and a lot of the inequality is simply invisible. We are told to be with our children - yet at the same time we are “allowed” to have a career, that wants us to be fully present, work long, inflexible hours and consider that we are less competent now that we are mothers.
I see the change that is happening and I’m very grateful to witness it. At the same time, here in Switzerland, we are still at the very beginning of any societal shifts. Family matters are considered private matters and that’s the main argument for politics to not get involved. We are lacking qualified work force and we see more and more women stop working because they don’t want to be part of this system anymore. They don’t want to live on the verge of burnout all the time, trying to fulfil the needs of their children and the demands of their bosses (while also juggling a household and trying to maintain relationships). They are exhausted because they are not taken care of and left on their own. They feel guilty for not spending more time with their kids and they feel guilty because they are struggling to do their paid jobs.
Motherhood is filled with conflicting emotions. Societal pressure can amplify this. Acknowledging that different emotions can co-exist and don’t make us “bad mothers” can be a start, a way of reducing the guilt and figuring out deep down, what it is that we want in this season of life. Because we can’t have it all and we can’t do it all - something always has to give and at the rate that our society is going right now, it’s for many the mental health of the mother.