Nearly everywhere I turn on social media, I see perfect mothers with immaculate homes, well-done makeup, and well-dressed children smiling for the cameras. They do synchronized dances and show off their home decor ideas, and they never raise their voices. They also demonstrate their cooking skills and teach us how to prepare healthy school lunches, as well as give tips on how to organize our kids' playroom. These moms are all over Instagram giving hacks on how to do motherhood as effortlessly as them and many of us wonder how they make it look so easy.
As for me, I'm just trying to wake up on time every day and make dinner. We also don't even have a playroom. I've been a mom for almost ten years, and I don't think I would ever say I've really had it all together.
Mom influencers have been huge for millennial and gen Z moms, and they have definitely had an impact. The need to compare yourself is just there. I'm old enough to know that comparing myself to others does me no favors, but I still have my own insecurities and know my own shortcomings. It does help to know that these mom influencers likely aren't doing all of their videos and content alone.
Those with really large channels have a team of people working behind them and even if they don't have a team, I know how long it must take to film, edit, post, and engage with your content, and quite honestly, I know that it must stress these moms out despite what they show. Still, what they put out there has us, regular old moms, feeling down on ourselves for no good reason, but it's not all social media's fault.
Moms have long been portrayed in the media as perfect beings who know it all and do it all effortlessly. They get up early to make full breakfasts, and their homes are clean. If they work, there appears to be no guilt from missing moments or pressure from their job to do more. If they stay home, the dishes are done, the laundry is put away, and they never feel like they may be losing their mind being surrounded by young children all day.
In this new generation of motherhood, women have taken it and turned it into a perfect mother cult, and it needs to end. I just can't do it and I don't think I want to. I know I'm far from alone with being a dysfunctional mess, but we all hide it a bit. You only admit to your closest friends that sometimes you let your kids eat chips and Oreos for breakfast because you just didn't have the energy to make anything.
The season of life I'm in is survival and I think that's just how it is for now. Any mom I talk to in person usually admits to being stressed, tired, frustrated, or even mad at their current state of motherhood. Yet we all think we should be handling the enormous responsibility of motherhood better than we are and that's mainly because the perfect motherhood cult has a huge presence in our lives.
Things do seem to be changing just a tiny bit. The changes I have seen come from the results of the pandemic when moms began to crack under the pressure to literally do it all. Moms had to teach, work, and entertain their kids 24/7 with no outlets such as friends, family, and activities, and it wasn't pretty. It couldn't be kept secret that women were struggling. The funny thing is that moms have been struggling for centuries all over the world, but we've just been pretending like everything is fine. The pandemic allowed moms to collectively agree that the emotional and mental burden of motherhood was often overwhelming.
There are no perfect mothers, just ones who have better emotional coping skills and naturally love to be organized. Unfortunately, that just isn't me.
My home is never clean in every room at the same time, and we don't even have a playroom. I don't prep my kid's lunches and I never fold all of our laundry in a timely manner. And I don't know about you all, but our home looks like we live in it. My kids are school-age now, and they can make an impressive mess in the hours from after school until bedtime. Every night we have a mess of blankets on our living room floor.
Sometimes I yell, then I feel bad and apologize. I'm often running late and forget to turn in papers or clean water bottles. I'm not a perfect mom and I don't think I could be if I tried.