“Play it again, Mommy,” my two-year-old daughter Emma yelled, brandishing her beloved Paw Patrol transforming vehicles. She wanted me to come up with another emergency so Chase, Marshall and Skye could come to the rescue. Again.
I should have been happy, sitting on a rug, playing with my beloved, longed-for daughter. But I wasn’t. In fact, I was bored stiff, casting guilty glances at my phone and wondering how much more I had to endure until I could send her off to nap.
Maybe it’s partly a problem of expectations: that is, the utterly unrealistic view my generation has of what motherhood is actually like, much of which has been deliberately constructed on social media specifically to sell us products.
I was 31 years old and newly married when I got pregnant with my first daughter. My husband and I were very interested in starting a family, so when I found out I was pregnant, I was not only very excited, but I also really wanted to be the best mom.
Of course, this idea was completely ridiculous, and now I laugh and cringe in equal measure at the idiotic ideas I had about parenting.
Bombarded with pastel-perfect images of the idyll of motherhood, social media makes mothers like author Katherine Faulkner (pictured) feel like failures.
I approached it literally the same way I approached my degree and my career: I read all the books, did endless research, listened to hypnobirthing podcasts, talked enthusiastically about how I would never put an iPad in front of my baby in a restaurant (ha!), and carefully wrote out a very specific birth plan (which, of course, no one at the hospital even looked at).
On social media, the algorithm took note of all my parenting book purchases, discovered I was pregnant, and began offering me a series of seductive mother influencers (or “mumfluencers”). These women sold me a carefully curated, curated, and, above all, shoppable version of motherhood, which influenced my totally unrealistic idea of what my new life would be like.
I looked forward to all the quiet hours I would spend with my mini-me making mess-free crafts, baking cakes in a spotless kitchen, and carefully watering flowers in pastel-colored pots.
Of course, I soon realized that the reality of parenting young children is somewhat different. For starters, Emma’s interests didn’t align with mine (anyone remember looking at garbage cans?).
Walks in the woods would start to go wrong after about three minutes (‘I’m cold! Take me, Mummy! I want a sandwich! Not that sandwich!’), while art or cake-making amused her only fleetingly but resulted in an entire afternoon of washing and cleaning, at which point I’d invariably give up and stick her in front of CBeebies.
What made it worse was that every time I scrolled through social media on my phone (usually while hiding from her, simmering with resentment in a cake mix-splattered kitchen), I came across posts from other mothers suggesting that they really were “treasure[ing]every moment” of motherhood: collecting autumn leaves on their successful woodland walks, icing their perfect fairy cupcakes, and generally existing in a permanent state of maternal bliss.
This content always made me feel terrible, but it was strangely addictive and I found myself unable to stop looking at the perfect online world these moms created.
In her book Momfluenced, Sara Petersen writes how mothers who consume this type of material online receive the persistent message that they are failing: “That person seems more patient than me, that person has a cleaner kitchen, that person is handling motherhood better than me.”
Admitting that you find the daily routine of raising children tedious is a taboo subject, which is why few parents talk about it.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, studies have linked Instagram use by mothers of young children with higher levels of anxiety.
In fact, I found it difficult to talk about how I felt because admitting that motherhood is unfulfilling is still a taboo subject.
Some of my new mom friends couldn’t understand why I went to so many baby classes and soft play sessions with my daughter: “Don’t you just want to stay home with her?”
I couldn’t admit that my enthusiasm for local music and “sensory baby” classes wasn’t because I thought she needed more stimulation, but because I needed it.
I was terribly jealous of my husband, who every morning escaped to an air-conditioned office with other adults to talk to and hot coffee on demand.
But I never admitted to anyone (not my husband, not my family, not even my coworkers) how boring I found everything. If anyone asked me, I would just say that everything was great, just a little tiring.
But I did explore some of these conflicting feelings about parenthood in my novel The Other Mothers.
Katherine (pictured with her kids on vacation) finally realized that motherhood isn’t something you can “earn,” nor should you be desperate to achieve it.
One character, Tash, struggles to reconcile her old identity as a news journalist with her new life as the mother of a young child. And she is addicted to comparing her own imperfect life to those of the glamorous mothers she meets at her son’s playgroup.
Mothers are reluctant to admit these complicated feelings because “we fear being judged,” says author Ashley Audrain, who has also written about the complicated emotions surrounding motherhood in her bestselling novels The Push and The Whispers. Like me, Audrain says she “has the irresistible urge to make a warning statement every time we say something negative about motherhood.”
In retrospect, although it was hell at the time, having my second baby right at the start of the Covid pandemic was what cured me of my futile quest for perfection as a mother.
Like millions of other women, I was suddenly stuck at home with a newborn and a struggling toddler. Not only did I feel liberated overnight from my formal childcare and usual generous family help, but there were no playgrounds, baby classes, playgrounds or anywhere else to go. I felt confronted with the relentlessness of raising my children 24/7 in a way I had somehow avoided before.
What I ultimately learned, however, is that parenting is not something you can “win” or “excel” at. It is not a project or a career. There are no rewards, no raises, no career advancements, not even a pat on the back at the end of the day.
It’s not linear; babies “trained” to sleep through the night will decide to back off; children who are coaxed into eating mashed broccoli at six months will suddenly, at two years, spit it out and say it’s “gross.” Every day they will resist your attempts at structure.
While it’s natural for parents to focus on tangible achievements, parenting coach Camilla McGill of My Parenting Solutions argues that time spent developing “your relationship and connection” with your child is “far more important than the reading group they’re in or the certificate they’ve earned in ballet,” because it means that when they reach the difficult teenage years, “they’ll look to you for guidance, not their peers.”
In other words, as difficult as it may be on your eighth Paw Patrol game, McGill insists that these small steps toward a deep, lasting connection with your child deserve their place on your mental checklist alongside laundry, admin, and the thousand other things that feel more tangible and immediate, “even if you can only find ten minutes.”
Katherine Faulkner’s Other Mothers is published by Raven Books and is available now.