Lately, I keep hearing these questions: If motherhood is so tough, why does anyone do it? Why don’t we talk about the good bits of parenting? Where are all the happy moms? “As someone who is still on the fence about having children, I feel like I’m overwhelmed by negative stories,” explained Eleanor Halls on Straight Up, the podcast she co-hosts with fellow journalist Kathleen Johnston. “I have got to a place now where I am craving not idealized, glossed-over versions of motherhood and birth, but just nice ones—nice, positive stories that don’t dwell on all the tears and the marriage breakdowns and the regret.” Meanwhile, on a recent episode of Australian podcast Shameless, host Michelle Andrews expressed similar feelings: “I keep being swamped with content that is telling me it will be terrible for my mental health, terrible for my body, terrible for my marriage. And I want a baby, I really do,” she said, “[but] I don’t want to sacrifice my happiness that I have now for a promise of, ‘Well, it’ll be worth it.’ None of you can actually tell me why.”
Listening to Andrews—who spoke with generous vulnerability, making no attempt to disguise her clear frustration and fear—I felt a distinct pang of guilt, because she’s right: Both online and IRL, so much of the contemporary discourse around birth and motherhood dwells deeply on the more difficult aspects of those experiences, and my own work is no exception to that. And while I stand by my words and am able to recognize and attest to the truth in other tales of parenting woe—the sleepless nights, the tantrums—I also know that these things are really only half (perhaps even quite significantly less than half) of the story. So why are they all we hear about?
I can only speak for myself, of course, but I think there are a few reasons why the cultural conversation around motherhood is skewing negative. For starters, it feels to me like a series of dividing lines is being drawn within my peer group with regards to our reproductive choices, and they’re becoming more pronounced by the day. Parents are pitted against childfree people; working mothers are pitted against trad wives. I’ve read think-pieces about whether parents and non-parents can still be friends, arguments about whether kids should be allowed in pubs, oblique references to a supposed gulf of experience on Taylor Swift’s latest album, and on Charli XCX’s. I find it all extremely anxiety-inducing, and I can’t help but fear that if I harp on too much about the good bits of motherhood—if I expound at length upon my newfound capacity for joy and love and wonder, or about how my sense of self and the world has been radically altered—I’ll risk appearing to pass judgement, somehow, on those who’ve chosen to remain childfree, and only make the division worse. And then there are those who aren’t childfree by choice to consider: for a long time, I was one of them, and while I never begrudged any of my child-having friends their happiness, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes find it painful to witness. Counterintuitive as it might seem, it just feels more sensitive to focus on the tough parts of parenting. It feels safer.
That sensitivity extends to other parents, too: The truth of childrearing is that you have some incredibly good days and some incredibly bad ones. On a bad day, there is absolutely nothing worse than hearing someone opine about their perfect parental bliss; it can feel like yet another impossible standard that you’re failing to meet. A wry remark about sleep deprivation just feels kinder; no one wants to appear smug. I think, too, that it can seem easier to bond over the difficult aspects of parenting because it’s these which are more likely to be a shared experience; at some point, most parents will endure the drudgery of toddler mealtimes, but very few know the particular joy of watching my two-year-old react to the Archers theme as if a DJ has just dropped an epic beat. Because, actually, that oft-quoted line from Tolstoy is all wrong: it’s unhappy families—or, rather, families’ unhappinesses—which are all alike. For the most part, they’re rooted in the same structural failings of society, after all: lack of access to affordable childcare, insufficient state-funded support for mental health, the cost-of-living crisis. We need to talk about them in order to change them. Joy, on the other hand, is individual and specific, both less interesting to others and more precious to us—which is, perhaps, another reason we don’t talk about it. It’s too delicate, too personal, too important.
And then there’s the fact that, for most of Western history, the idealized mother has been portrayed as passive, serene, and self-sacrificing, while parenting has been depicted as an unequivocal joy. Experiencing the very different (and often gritty) reality feels shocking, an experience that should be urgently communicated. And it is being communicated: Recent decades have seen a proliferation of writing about motherhood which is honest, raw, and nuanced, and which allows for a multiplicity of different voices and experiences, whether it’s non-fiction like Lucy Jones’s Matrescence and Pragya Agarwal’s (M)otherhood, novels like Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, memoirs like Candice Brathwaite’s I Am Not Your Baby Mother and Kirsty Logan’s The Unfamiliar, or poetry like Liz Berry’s The Republic of Motherhood. There’s also more space to discuss feelings of uncertainty around the choice to have children in the first place. The comments from Halls with which I opened this piece were made during a two-part special edition of her podcast entitled “The Big Kids Question,” a thoughtful and thorough deep-dive. I’m so glad that these discussions are taking place, and proud to have made my own tiny contribution to the discourse. But if I thought that minimizing references to the joy and profundity of motherhood was a kindness, I now see that, in focusing solely on its difficulties, I have inadvertently done an unkindness to women like Halls and Andrews who are simply trying to understand what might await them. Presenting a rich and nuanced depiction of motherhood is important—but that means we need to talk about the joy, too.
My two-year-old loves not just the Archers theme but also Notorious BIG’s “Juicy” (the non-explicit version, don’t write in) and also Bach’s “Cello Suite No 1 in G Major.” If you tell her to “be gentle” she strokes the cat, or maybe your hair, or maybe her own. If she sees a picture of a circle, she will point at it and shout, “Moon!” If she hears a duck quack, she will quack back. Sometimes she’ll run up to me and lay her golden head against my knee and say “Song?” or “Book?” or just “Mum!” Sometimes she’ll climb into my lap and place her tiny, perfect palm, all sticky with yogurt and finger-paint, against my cheek. Her eyes sparkle. Her smile dazzles. And her laugh? It’s the most exquisite sound I have ever heard.
