The cultural image of motherhood
Just recently I finished an audio book of a romance novel, where the girl and the boy get together at the end. In the last chapter, she dreams of their future together, of getting married, of having a family, of slow days where she sits in bed writing novels while their baby is sleeping peacefully next to her.
I love romance. Down the road from where we live, the old telephone cabin has been repurposed as a lending library and whenever I find a romance novel in English, I will grab it and read it within a few days. I love diving into another world, following the main protagonists on their journey and reading about happy endings. In the past years I’ve alternated between summer beach reads and Christmas love stories as the seasons unfolded.
But listening to this ending made my body react. I felt the bliss of the main character, finally married to the man she’d been in love with for years, building a family together, welcoming a baby, continuing their life as a writer whilst also looking after their child.
And at the same time, I saw the reality of motherhood as I’d gotten to know it and I realised that those images clashed. Early motherhood for me was filled with anxiety around the baby, the fear of doing something wrong, the loneliness of being at home with a tiny human all day. I remember the sleepless nights, the chaotic house, the days where I just wasn’t able to prepare myself any food because the hours just flew by looking after my baby, breastfeeding, changing diapers. There was a lot of joy too - first smiles, watching them learn new skills, nap time snuggles.
And there was the sheer exhaustion. The body that was recovering from more than running a marathon, but also was supposed to function again and ideally “snap back”. The breastfeeding that felt at times like my baby was sucking the energy out of me. And the expectations - trying to meet them in any way possible without realising at that point that it just was not possible to an extend.
The reality of what I felt when I became a mother was not pure bliss. I was happy to welcome these tiny humans into our lives, I was grateful that everything had gone smoothly and both boys were healthy. But in those early days, no matter what happened, there was no time for that pure bliss. The moments where I was doing what I wanted to do with a peacefully sleeping baby next to me were rare. With my second son, it mostly involved me carrying him in the baby carrier while writing a blog post or watching TV - something that also didn’t always feel easy on my body after pregnancy and birth. When they napped, I tried to nap - or at least I tried to relax. I was too exhausted to get anything done, let alone do some meaningful work. Support was rare as my husband had to go back to work after a few weeks and we don’t have “the village” anymore.
I know that this is my perspective and my personal experience. But having worked with mothers and talked to friends who have children, I see that there is a lot of exhaustion amongst mothers (and parents in general) with babies that is often just considered as “normal”. We keep talking about how important sleep is for our bodies and brains, yet we let mothers run on only a couple of hours of sleep for months, even years. After every major operation, we are told to be on bedrest for a while as we recover. Yet after birth - and a C-section is a major operation - women are expected to “bounce back”, look after a tiny human, feed them, run a household, possibly look after old siblings and somehow recover too. All the while trying to figure out who they are now and why they are feeling “off” while everyone else around them seems to adjust easily to their new role.
I realise that society shows us how motherhood is supposed to look like. In movies, we see births portrayed, with a mother holding her baby in her arms and looking blissful afterwards. But we rarely portray the chaos that is postpartum, the loneliness of being alone at home with your tiny human that you want to protect so fiercely you worry about them every second of every day.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of beauty in motherhood - the miracle of actually being able to grow and birth a child being the first one. But motherhood is more than just those moments of pure bliss, of calm, of being able to have a fulfilled career and having the loving relationship. There is chaos, messiness, tears, fear, fights, exhaustion, transformation, questioning, a re-birth of the mother. These things can be beautiful too when we are supported, because they help us grow, into the mother that we are, the mother we choose to be. These parts are often not portrayed in Hollywood movies or romantic novels. Do we romanticise that it means to be a mother? Is this why we have certain expectations of how being a mother looks like? And why we are often shocked at the reality of it?