The Motherhood Struggle—But Is It the Whole Story?
Is motherhood as hard as we make it out to be?
I was wondering this as I was scrolling on social media and seeing the endless posts of moms on the Internet talking about how hard being a mom is.
I was feeling conflicted about it because certainly being a mother isn’t easy, but is it as hard as we make it out to be?
Motherhood takes all of you. From pregnancy to raising your kids, it takes your mental capacity, emotional depth, physical stamina, and your spirit to be a good mother.
I also think that our perspective affects how we see our circumstances. Everyone understands that a positive mindset creates a better experience in life. I think that goes without saying, but I wonder how often we leave that at the door when we are raising our children and how we can change that.
Why Motherhood Feels Overwhelming for So Many
I wanna go back in time.
What I see from the millennial mothers of my generation a lot of the time is how hard motherhood is, but I think back to what my mother and grandmother had to deal with, and sometimes I have to ask myself, what exactly are we complaining about?
We have the most technological advancements that we’ve ever had. We have more modern conveniences than have ever been.
None of us have to do laundry by hand. Most of us are not baking and cooking from scratch, and we don’t have to walk to and from the places that we need to get to. There are also endless opportunities to contribute to the household economy by working from home.
So I get confused at times as to what makes motherhood so hard in this generation.
For example, my grandmother was from Jamaica. My mother is from Jamaica. That is a Third World country.
The amount of opportunity was so little that she made her way to the United States with a third grade level education and ended up being able to bring all eight of her children to the United States for a better life, and that was in the 1970s era during Jim Crow right on the heels of segregation. She faced struggles then that I don’t face now.
Women, in general, have more opportunity now than we ever have, and yet we still find so much to complain about.
I wonder where that comes from because I think if we were to dive into what the generations past had to do and had to survive to raise their children, we might think a bit differently.
Why is it that we say motherhood is so hard now when most of us would not have been able to survive during those times?
One of the reasons is the expectations that we carry from this generation.
We have social media comparison, and the standard of living has increased exponentially from what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers ever even thought possible. We see other people‘s worlds on social media, and there are certain things that we want for ourselves, and we end up comparing our situation to others.
We compare what we have now to what we want, or what we think we want, and in some ways, it’s a relentless pursuit of more.
But if we look back, I think we would have more of a sense of gratitude for what we do have. Framing motherhood in the lens of the past could give us a more sobering perspective of how we mother today, and that gratitude of not having the struggles that our ancestors had would produce more joy in us today.
If I wanna go get a glass of water, I don’t need to go down to the river with my baby strapped on my back to get it and hope that it’s clean. Many mothers around the world still have to operate this way to raise their children.
I think our poor perspectives are a Western and American problem, and we have to work on shifting our mindsets around motherhood.
The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
I know that this phrase gets hyped up a bit nowadays, but changing your mindset is everything.
No matter what the perspective is, your mindset is key to changing how you feel about your situation.
The reason why the Bible talks about renewing your mind is because thoughts lead to emotions, and then emotions then lead to action. If your thought is, “This is so hard” then your emotion becomes discontent, which then leads to an action of complaining or not taking advantage of whatever the situation you have right now.
I also wanna acknowledge that many of us in this day and age were not raised to be mothers. So many of us millennial women growing up were raised to get an education to get a good job to become a stable, productive member of the workforce.
Unlike generations past who were raised to be wives and mothers. Just like anything, the more you practice something the easier it gets, so if all of your life, you have been focused on getting good grades and getting a good job, but you’ve never worked on the skill sets that that are required for running a household or raising children it is going to be more difficult for you.
This is a job that many of us were not prepared for and in that regard I sympathize because you’re expected to do something that you were never trained to do.
For all of our parents or our mothers’ good intentions, it led a lot of us to be inadequately prepared for the realities of motherhood.
Getting up in the middle of the night, little people crying, “overstimulation,” and being in pain are all normal. And I think the shock and awe of it negatively hits us because we were not told that that was going to be normal. If you weren’t raised in a family or in a culture that prepared you specifically for being a wife and a mother, then you’re going to be lacking in that area, and that is something that you’re gonna have to figure out for yourself.
What No One Tells You About Making Motherhood Easier
I know that a lot of people will tell moms with young kids that it gets easier. And what they mean is, it’ll get easier with time or it’ll get easier as they get older, but I think that we can come into it with a perspective that it can get easier because of changes that we make within ourselves.
For one, when we can shift our mindset about motherhood, recognizing the reality of the energy and the effort that we’re putting in every day to raise our kids, and then also acknowledging where we might feel unprepared for the task.
Coupled with the gratitude from looking at what past generations had to go through to raise their children. There are also some practical steps that we can take to ship our perspective to make motherhood easier today.
If you’re in the throws of newborn life or a big transition from one to two kids or 2 to 3, then it might take a little bit to get your systems in place. But when they’re older, flying by the seat of your pants will only make things more stressful. Sitting down, devising a plan, and setting up a system or routine can make the way that you approach every day with your children a bit easier.
I’m naturally a systems-oriented person. I think of everything in regards to efficiency, routine, and order, but if you’re not like that, it might take a little bit of extra effort to put some type of structure to your day to reduce the amount of chaos that you experience. This doesn’t mean that everything will happen at the same time every day, but it will inform the way that you function.
This will vary from family to family. Think about what works best for the way your family operates, the personalities or temperament that your children have and your own personality and temperament and test out different structures or different routines and see what will work for you.
- 2. Your Support Network
A lot of us don’t always have the types of supports that we would like but at the very least, having open communication with your spouse in regards to the day-to-day needs of you and your children it’s gonna be paramount.
Be open and clear and direct about your needs, the needs of the children, and how you want to function as a household.
3. Emotional Endurance
If you are the type of person who has always challenged yourself and always put yourself in situations where you needed to grow, then this level of resilience or this level of endurance might come a little bit more easily to you. If not, then motherhood is your training ground. You will need to accept that and put things in place to support yourself.
One of my favorite quotes from Myron Golden is that “expectation is your greatest superpower.”
If you expect your day to be hard, then that’s what you can expect to see every day. If you change what you’re expecting, you make room for new possibilities.
Shifting your expectations changes the way you interact with your environment. It can be difficult if that’s something that you’ve never done before, but that’s also what’s key to changing your mindset.
The Truth That Will Set You Free
The hardest part of motherhood is not the tasks that we do or the diapers that we change or the laundry that we fold. It is the mindset that we take into how we parent every single day.
How are you renewing your mind and adjusting your expectations in regards to how you parent and how you show up as a mother?
This isn’t to say that motherhood will suddenly not become challenging when getting up at 1, 3, 5 and 6 AM. But I don’t think it needs to be as hard as we make it if we come into it with gratitude and the right kind of perspective.
What if we saw motherhood as something not to break us, but to build us into the kind of people that we are meant to become?
I want to challenge you: What mindset have you had about motherhood that is holding you back from fully embracing it?
Leave a Reply