Today I’m officially beginning One Tired Mother, a publication about modern womanhood. I saw a shirt in a thrift store about 5 years ago with this phrase in all caps across the front. Not only did I buy it, I immediately knew it would be a great name for a future project. Here we are!
I chose to launch today because I always feel like doing something meaningful for my motherhood on Mother’s Day, a day that otherwise feels pretty un-meaningful to me. I’ve been thinking about why this is for years. About seven years, to be exact, as that’s about how many Mother’s Days have passed since I became one myself. I’ve experienced feelings of disappointment, anger, frustration, and sadness as I’ve longed (with decreasing hope each year) for the day to feel like it actually honors all that motherhood is and has been for me, and though I’ve gotten better at enjoying the day when it rolls around each year, it still remains a source of annoyance and psychic stress for me.
I know I’m not alone. Social media has a lot to say about this day for women who’ve experienced clear pain around motherhood, like women who have miscarried and those who’ve lost their mothers and those who have distant or overly terrible relationships with their own mothers. I love this, as recognizing common-and-painful things is good. But there are also plenty of us out here who don’t have any concrete suffering about anything related to the day — we just sort of hate it and we don’t exactly know why.
As I’ve looked over things I’ve written over the years and recalled conversations I’ve had with women (in real life and on Instagram), I suspect it comes down to a few things. First, that there’s incongruence between the motherhood many women personally experience and the way our culture (both secular culture and church/Christian culture) views motherhood; second, that the work of motherhood remains as invisible and unappreciated as ever, and third, that it’s an attempt to celebrate something that is difficult (if not impossible) to celebrate.
Motherhood in popular culture, at least here in the U.S., is not considered important or powerful. Generally speaking, it’s seen as something irrelevant or unappealing — especially for smart, competent women. (Put the word “mom” before another word to get a sense of this cultural vibe. Mom jeans. Mom cut. Mom voice. Mom blog. All slightly uncool and mostly embarrassing.) Sure, become a mother, whatever, the cultural messaging goes, but definitely don’t plan your life around it. Ew. Education! Career! And motherhood, I guess if you want.
As someone with feminist inclinations, I definitely absorbed this message that motherhood isn’t a topic (or frankly, an experience) with much substance or power. And then I became a mother, and I was like holy f! Look at these sacred beings I created, birthed, and fed with my body! What an insane privilege to get to know them and watch them unfold! This is deeply meaningful and powerful work! I’m obsessed!
Incongruence.
And then we have Christian/church culture, which doesn’t denigrate motherhood but essentially does the opposite. In much of church culture motherhood is put on a weird pedestal, along with a syrupy message of self-sacrifice and total happiness and fulfillment. Motherhood is seen as the highest and best calling on a woman’s life, and putting your children before yourself is the way to do it.
Except it’s not healthy (or even reasonable) for women to sacrifice themselves totally, even for a good cause. As a generation aware of all things mental and emotional health, we know this. We know we need life outside of our children. We love them, and we also want to be whole, happy women. But we’re made to feel from Christian culture like that’s not right.
Incongruence.
Apparently, these are our options as modern women: Barely consider motherhood or lay ourselves down at its feet. Motherhood is either a) boring, shallow, and irrelevant, or b) something we should totally lose ourselves in.
These messages ain’t it, and we know it. We know in our bones there’s more nuance than either secular or Christian culture seems to want to admit. So whether we’re at church or just on Instagram, I think a lot of us don’t really feel seen in our experiences, and so Mother’s Day feels kinda meh.
Then there’s the work of motherhood that no one, anywhere, seems to want to acknowledge: care work and the work of the home. Having to say you “don’t work” when you’re engaged in constant work as a stay-at-home mother is frustrating. Hearing the super common phrase “you’re doing the most important job in the world” while doing relentless, invisible, unpaid, unglamorous work that’s taken completely for granted yet literally makes the world go ‘round… is also frustrating.
A friend of mine said the other day while we were talking on the phone: “I feel like motherhood is a collection of all the work no one wants to do.” That hit. With this in mind, a cynical but thoughtful conclusion to draw might be something like “It seems like we have Mother’s Day so no one has to feel responsible to actually understand or acknowledge or maybe help with all that mothers do the other 364 days of the year.” A card and some flowers and they’ll keep doing the cooking and the dishes and the laundry and the moment-to-moment parenting so no one else has to.
And then, the kicker. When The Day comes around, mothers often still have to do what they always do: think of and plan the logistics, think of and purchase the things, explain the day to the kids, figure out what people will eat, etc. etc. etc. It’s like meta-frustration. Ope, STILL doing all that invisible work on a day that’s supposed to honor us and all we do!
Finally, there’s a third reason I think Mother’s Day just, like, doesn’t work—and it’s a little less cynical. This is a recent contemplation that came from listening to Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox Christian and one of my favorite spiritual thinkers. He talks a lot about symbolism and the deeper realities behind things, and I appreciate him so much. In this podcast, he was talking about the feminine and the masculine (here’s an article on these concepts, if you’re unfamiliar).
“It's difficult to show the value of the feminine,” he said. “You have to be careful not to make it masculine as soon as you try to show the value of it. It's like, if you give a medal to the feminine, you're playing the masculine game by doing that. If you want to actually venerate the feminine, it's another game.”
Mmmm. Wow.
He didn’t give any ideas for how to honor and respect the feminine, but he went on to say something else that blew my mind: that the value and power of the feminine is often hidden, because hiddenness, secret-ness, is its nature. It’s powerful without being seen or recognized for the power it has.
This unlocked something for me. Maybe Mother’s Day feels underwhelming not just because we have a major lack of truth and nuance in our culture around motherhood but because so much of motherhood is feminine energy, and feminine energy is inherently harder to pin down. It’s intuition over logic. It’s being over doing. It’s community over efficiency. It’s caring and relating over accomplishing. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s beautiful. Because maybe part of what it means to be a mother is to exist outside of the need for external validation or outward celebration and just do what needs to be done because we know, deep inside, what we’re up to and how much it matters.
So there are some of my thoughts on Mother’s Day. I’d love to hear your reactions and connections (always).
As a last note, I’ll say this: though it may seem otherwise, I’m actually not into complaining. I am into making things better. We have some problems—culturally, spiritually, and otherwise—around motherhood and womanhood. I’m not saying I have the answers, but I do have some observations and I’d like to think about this together.
If you’re into it, let’s go.
P.S. Regarding the box you see below: this is the whole written post, but the audio version (where I read the post out loud) is only accessible to paid subscribers. Subscribe to One Tired Mother at $5/month to get not only post audios but also podcast rants that are too spicy or vulnerable for all the Internet to hear.