When You Hate Being a Mom
Last week I got together for breakfast with my good friend Deniece Williams, Grammy-award artist and mom extraordinaire. As usual, our conversation veered towards discussing our kids and trading parenting horror stories: car keys borrowed without permission, surprise meals for mom that ended up in disaster, a huge Amazon credit card bill for Legos… the list goes on. Most of them we eventually learn to laugh off. Some still made us only half-laugh. I had just shared a particularly crazy one, which had us roaring with laughter when Deniece said:
“James, I love being a mom. But there have been times that… Hmm-hmmm!”
She shook her head with a smile and took a deep breath.
I immediately knew what she meant, and I was reminded of how willfully ignorant I had been.
As a guy, I’ve always idealized moms to be moms, loving, accepting, and sometimes super frustrated with kids but always ready to turn the page and kiss the boo-boo better. That’s a mom’s job, right? I’d never stopped to consider how motherhood affects a woman. I mean, beyond the obvious.
Sometimes we don’t stop to think about what sacrifices have been made, which paths have not been taken, and how dreams get postponed, shelved, and, more often than not, forgotten. Just a quick browsing through statistics will tell you that mothers are the ones pulling the short straw when it comes to parenting. Either they drop everything they had planned in life or continue with their plans juggling so many hats that they end up with little to no me-time. The way I see it, society has made it so that mother is expected to pull triple duty without the support of their employer and often their partner and kids.
Now, let me be clear, I have not met a single mom who regrets being a mom. In fact, they regard their kids as their greatest achievement and joy. No sacrifice is too great, and no task too daunting if it means their children will be happy, healthy, and successful.
But I’ve discovered that they get reprimanded and shunned by others when they dare speak differently from the motherhood script they’re supposed to follow. The pressure to be a Mom goes beyond the actual duties and tasks that a mother tends to have to do for her kid. It’s also an imposed vision of what mothering can and cannot do. Admitting and being vocal about the negative emotions that surface at times is not something society at large wants to hear - they prefer you sing the praises of child-rearing. So, instead of being encouraged to explore these feelings, mothers are guilted into silence.
As we all know, bottled-up emotions have a knack for causing Krakatoa-style eruptions, which mostly lead to more festering and possibly more meltdowns. Or maybe you push them down so deep you start regarding your kids as frienemies?: “Sure, green trousers with orange polka dot tee, what a great outfit for your first date! Now, here’s a spray paint can; go leave her a message on her sidewalk; she’ll love it” See what I mean?
So all of you moms reading this, please know that when you hate being a mom, you need to speak out! When you share these feelings, you’re actually helping change this stagnant view of who you are and who you need to be as a mother and bringing a lot of truth into this very whitewashed concept.
(I explore more extensively the sentiment of hatred in parents in my complimentary ebook, How to Stop Hating Being a Parent, which you can download here.).