What You Need To Know About Modern Mothering
I have just returned from two weeks "holiday" in Bali with my husband and kids. I say "holiday" because anyone with kids knows that a holiday is really just parenting in different locations. It's not the kind of holiday you may have experienced in your pre-children days..
But this holiday was different from others because we travelled with my brother in law, my sister in law, and their three children. We are fortunate enough to all get along really well - the kids adore each other so despite the sometimes harrowing moments of managing 5 kids under 8 years of age - they do keep each other very busy.
In the days since we have returned from our trip, there is one thing that has really been on my mind however.. and that is that even though I still felt stressed while we were away; I had 3 other adults to share the load with at any given moment, and to express my feelings to so I could feel seen and heard. One of the biggest changes I noticed was how my physical body felt - stress for me always shows up as pain in my body but on this trip I had no headaches, no back pain, and no shoulder pain. And this is again, despite at times feeling like it was absolute madness over there. It wasn't perfect because nothing is, but it felt more easily nourishing than my day to day life of being a mother at home.
Toward the end of the trip, my husband remarked that we had all become so used to being around each other that now we're all just pulling each other's kids into line, holding someone else crying child, goofing around with each other's kids, stepping in when we can see the overwhelm on another parent's face etc. So as I reflected on this, I was reminded that we were never meant to mother or parent in isolated nuclear family units. But our modern culture would have us believe that not only should we be managing all the needs of our children on our own, but we should also be excelling at it. I want you to know that this is straight fuckery. It's unachievable, it's unsustainable, and it's oppressive. It keeps us women small, believing we're not enough/failures, overburdened, and too busy to raise our voices in the fight for change across a variety of areas.
So I'd like to prompt you to reflect on this question: When you're struggling to keep all the balls in the air - what do you attribute this to? Do you believe it's because you're not enough? Do you think that everyone else has it together and it's just you that is "failing"?
Then I want you to ask yourself if you would make the same attribution if another much loved mama friend of yours expressed her struggle to keep it all together. Would it be her fault? Would it be her failure? Would you see her as not being enough? If you answered no, what would you attribute her challenge to? If you're anything like me, you might identify a number of factors that make it hard for her to look after her own needs as well as those of her children and family.
The patriarchal ideologies of motherhood (which include self sacrifice, 24/7 availability, achievement, and perfectionism) have us believing we are the problem - but it is in fact these ideologies that are problematic. So what do we do with this then? how do we make it better? DO LESS. It's that simple and that hard. If we want to change the social structures that we mother within, we need to mother differently to the ways we have been conditioned to mother. So rather than doing more, do less. When it feels like "you're pushing shit uphill" - remind yourself that you are doing the impossible task of mothering in a modern world where you lack support, visibility, and value. Stack on the self compassion, and then ask yourself what part of this load can I unburden myself from? What could you drop that would provide instant relief?
These are some of the things I have dropped when I'm struggling to keep all the balls in the air: kids swimming lessons for a week or two, plans I said yes to when I had more energy, cooking from scratch, folding the laundry, daily showers or baths for the kids, cleaning the house.
So mama, how you will remove some of your load over the next week?