I accepted the news of my pregnancy with an embarrassing lack of grace. For the first three months, I cried every day, mostly in the disabled bathroom at work, in quiet despair for what was about to happen. I called my mom and told her I was too young and I still had many adventures left in my life. “You’re 35,” she said about the first thing (I could hear her eyes rolling), “and you’re not going to die.”
The problem for me was that everywhere I looked, not just on social media, but in the news, books, movies, and television, all I saw were descriptions of parent-child relationships (particularly mothers) that portrayed a tragic loneliness. , overwhelming and even scary.
From “This Is Going to Hurt” and “Motherland,” which explore the dark side of motherhood for comedy, to books like last year’s hit millennial confessional memoirs “Soldier,” “Sailor,” and “#momtok.” Small moments of beauty and light were inevitably overshadowed. A big story about women on the brink.
What was even more alarming to me was that all of this was a progressive, honest, and courageous record of the “real” face of modern motherhood: overwork, sleepless nights, and horrifying guilt. It was what was advertised as being.
I’m not the only one who seeks this perspective and finds it terrifying. A recent US study by parenting app Peanuts surveyed 5,000 users and found that most users felt joy was missing from modern motherhood. .
Of course, negative discourse about parenting did not spring up out of thin air. The Center for Progressive Policy think tank said last week that Britain’s birth rate is falling faster than other G7 countries, with austerity being the main factor. We have some of the worst maternity regulations and most expensive infant care of any country in Europe, all of which contribute to creating an unnecessarily difficult and depressing experience for parents, especially mothers.
Even when women manage to walk the tightrope of working and raising children, they are often looked down upon and undervalued. Even Kemi Badenoch, no ally of working mothers – who recently suggested that Britain’s relatively meager maternity benefits are too much – has come under fire for having children. Last week, the Conservative leadership candidate was told by party members that she was unfit for the job because she was a mother and was “preoccupied” with her young children. Expensive and fragmented, motherhood doesn’t seem like an attractive proposition.
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Ever since I was a child, I always knew I would have children, but as I entered my 30s, it seemed so depressing that I put off making the active decision. Of course, I think all this “authenticity” and truth-telling is a necessary correction after so many years of motherhood being shown to be nothing more than thoughtless self-sacrifice and constant joy, if portrayed at all. I understood that. Still, I didn’t want to give up my career, freedom, and physical and mental health for a baby. If the rise of anonymous confession writers is to be believed, I might regret having a baby.
And all of a sudden, I’m 35 years old and I’m like, “I’m 35 years old. It can’t be that bad, people have always done it. ” I never expected that actually being pregnant would cause such a visceral reaction. And some of that may be due to hormones.
According to the NHS Pregnancy Journey website, as you move into your second trimester, your anxiety about what’s to come eases somewhat, but it doesn’t completely go away. I spent most of my pregnancy seeking reassurance from everyone I met that it was going to be okay, that becoming a mother was not the end of fun, not the beginning of hard work, and that it was going to be fun. .
When my baby was born 7 months ago, 6 weeks early, I felt hollow at the size of it all. The experience for me was worse than I expected – worse than all the Instagram confessional posts I had been led to believe – and at the same time infinitely better, easier, and yes, more fun. there was. What I found difficult was that the learning curve was very steep and there was so much to absorb. — and how dire the consequences could be if something went wrong.
For example, the baby was premature and very small, and initially there were problems with feeding. I’ve never been a particularly paranoid person, but there was a moment on my sixth or seventh day in intensive care when I was convinced the nurses were talking about me, about her illness. , I almost cried when I thought about it now. I wasn’t feeding him as much as the doctor wanted.
Sleep-deprived and shaking with postpartum adrenaline, I hid in a cubicle with my baby and cried as quietly as I could, thinking that I might never be allowed to take her home. Among the Instagram posts about sleep training and toddler tantrums, not a single person mentioned psychedelic levels of anxiety or fear. And of course it was misguided. Two days later, when she passed all the medical tests with flying colors, they allowed me to take her.
But in that moment, I felt the weight of despair released from the reality of the situation, and many times after, I gasped for air with anxiety that was out of proportion to what was actually happening, but how bad it was. It seems to be highlighting what will happen. It would ruin this whole parenting thing.
Similarly, I found the daily experience of caring for her simple enough – sleep, feed, dress, repeat. In fact, I was getting a little bored with its simplicity until she became a little more active. It turns out sleep deprivation is also manageable. It’s obvious that no one enjoys waking up eight times a night (it happened to us a few times), but we know that this isn’t always the case. And at the moment when I squealed Orc like a pig and melted her with laughter, I felt a wave of joy so extreme and all-encompassing that if it brought a smile to this child, I would be happy I feel like I can humiliate myself forever.
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Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I go to listen to her breathing and I feel such a deep calm that I fall asleep as soon as I get back to bed. I find the process of feeding her mashed cauliflower incredibly exciting. She grabbed the spoon from my hand. This child is a genius! These moments are not aesthetic or interesting to anyone but me, but in their regularity and routine they have brought a sense of wonder to my life.
Luckily, even though I work full-time, I have a boyfriend who shares my evening meals with me, so I can sleep uninterrupted most nights. The same goes for childcare, where he takes on more than his fair share of work. She also took paid maternity leave from her previous job, lives in a stable home, has savings, and has supportive friends and family. Thanks to all this, finding joy is easy.
Interestingly, the popular trad wife, model and influencer Nala Smith, 23, who regularly attracts tens of millions of viewers with her breathless cooking videos, says Gen Z is also simple-minded. This seems to imply that he is looking for a positive perspective. . In a departure from the jaded momfluencers of yesteryear and embracing a glorified version of motherhood, a model in a white tulle evening dress makes homemade chips and cereal for her three young children. This is a version of that experience (I’ve never seen it before). Perhaps it always comes full circle. One generation is freed from the shackles of ideology, and the next generation wears it with joy. Or maybe it’s just not possible to express motherhood in a way that feels relevant to all of us.
Indeed, in the age of algorithms, we are less likely to be presented with a nuanced “take” as inflammatory content attracts more attention. This has a flattening effect, squeezing an otherwise rich experience of joy, laughter, connection, fear, terror, sadness, and more into an easily consumable soundbite.
As I told a friend recently, becoming a parent has pushed me to my limits and shown me the extremes of love and fear of my potential. In that sense, it’s been a very wild journey, but also a magical one. I’m still trying to figure out how to compress all this into an Instagram post.
