The Ugly Truth About Motherhood
When you live for your kids, but they don’t live for you
The worst I have ever felt about myself as a human being was in relation to my role as mother to my three kids. That’s the god-honest truth of it.
Let me say that again. The worst, shittiest mental health I have ever experienced — across the span of my entire life, which is now into its fifth decade — is directly the result of my decision to have kids.
They don’t tell you this when you sign out of the hospital. You’ve got this tiny human and it relies on you for everything and you know your life is about to get turned upside down and for the most part you are okay with that because it’s the price you pay for having a small piece of your heart cloned and walking around outside of your body — which is a lovely, sweet rainbow-y, pure kind of thing.
You’ve procreated. You’ve contributed to the expansion of the human species. Your DNA lives on.
Isn’t it beautiful?
Well, no. Not for everyone. I know people who desperately, desperately want to be parents. I know people who have absolutely no trouble falling pregnant and suddenly find themselves with five or six kids and no more spare hands to hold on to them. I know people who have become pregnant and terminated. I know people who ought not to have become parents at all.
All are valid.
And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet…
Motherhood is a goddamn shit show. It’s wonderful, yes. But it’s also the worst fucking thing you’ll ever go through, and not enough of us are willing to talk about the shitty parts out loud.
I am convinced that my kids — who are now aged almost 23, 21, and almost 20 — barely tolerate my input on a good day and downright hate my guts on a bad day.
We won’t talk about the utter decimation of the body required to grow them, birth them, or feed them. That’s not new. We all know about the swollen face and broken capillaries and fat fucking feet that won’t fit into shoes and the breakouts and the goop that just fucking drips from every old orifice and sometimes from the new ones as well (prenatal colostrum t*tties, anyone?). We won’t talk about that.
And we won’t talk about the fact that in no other profession on earth is the end game to do your job so well that you render yourself obsolete.
Think about that for a moment. Your literal aim is to raise your offspring to a point where they no longer require your help to stay alive (and, for extra credit, to be decent to other human beings). Your whole point of existence is to be the human that trains the person who replaces you. We definitely won’t talk about that.
So fuck it. Let’s get real instead.
Let’s talk about the point at which — sometime in mid-to-late adolescence — they decide that not only do they not need your advice anymore but also that you, the parent who has raised them for a decade and a half and who has paid for literally everything they own, are actively working to ruin their life.
Your sole purpose for living has suddenly — inexplicably — moved from nurturing, teaching, encouraging, feeding, and loving these gorgeous little DNA parcels to (apparently) active destruction of their entire worlds. Just because you feel like it.
The assignments they won’t complete at school — that’s your fault. The room they won’t clean — that’s your stupid, unreasonable rules. The basic respect you require as a human being — ha, you sucker, you don’t deserve that!
Admiration? Love? Speaking well of you to their friends? Pride? Acknowledgment of your existence in any form?
Are you fucking kidding me? That’s for rich television families, and you’re a piece of shit. Stay in your lane, Average Parent.
Enough of us have run the parenting gauntlet to warn those that come after us that teenagers are assholes. This is not new information. Plus we lived through puberty and we remember the hormone wave. So if you’ve been paying even half of the attention you ought to have, you’ll have had enough of a heads up about The Asshole Years to steel your tender little heart against them.
What they don’t warn you about is the really gritty, soul-sucking, why-the-ever-loving-FUCK-did-I-have-kids moments. The times that will have you questioning everything you ever did to anyone, ever, in any life— because god fucking damn, the karma that shot this funnel of flaming excrement in your direction has surely, surely been the result of you doing something truly heinous in a past life.
They don’t warn you about the times when, after asking your kid to come out of their room for dinner, you get screamed at for your audacity, even after you purposely made them their favourite meal.
The times when, after driving them to work so they don’t have to walk in the rain, they don’t even acknowledge you, thank you or even look in your direction.
The times when they forget you exist, like on your birthday, even when you live in the same house.
The times when you would die, literally throw yourself in front of a fucking train to save them a morsel of pain, and they can’t be bothered fetching the tissues for you when you’ve got a head cold.
The times when the barbed insults that are thrown in your direction as retaliation for some minor request — like “please unload the dishwasher” — get in past the carefully reinforced wall around your heart and suddenly you’re crying your fucking guts out in the bathroom behind a locked door because maybe, just maybe, you truly are a piece of shit, and this is all deserved, and maybe they wouldn’t even be sad if you got sick or just…disappeared?
And you watch yourself in the mirror, your face contorted like you’ve been stung by a whole hive of bees, just fucking silent-wailing into the void so that your family never, ever, ever, finds out just how badly your heart is breaking because somewhere in amongst all this bullshit you still care, you still care so fucking much about your kids that you would die a thousand silent deaths alone and cold in the bathroom before you would injure their souls by letting them see how hurt you are.
As mothers, we aren’t supposed to talk about this stuff. We’re supposed to smile and wave. Make the school lunches. Be happy. Be present. Be selfless. Always love. Always endure. Always come back. If our heart is breaking, we’re meant to keep it to ourselves lest we make the wheel a little too squeaky, a little too annoying, a little too cumbersome.
Nobody tells us this. We’ve absorbed the terms of this social contract from birth. It was unfathomable to leave your dolls out in the rain to get dirty and wet. We practiced feeding them and changing them and dressing them and taking them for walks in their stroller. We watch perfect families in TV shows and movies our whole fucking lives and we know exactly where the line is drawn. Have a glass of wine after dinner if you’re stressed, ladies! That’ll spackle right the fuck over the bullet wound in your heart!
We’re not supposed to dread the day the kids move out because we suspect, deep in our hearts, that they might never come back — they might never actually invite you to their home, might never one day introduce you to the new partner they haven’t yet met, might never allow you to see your grandchildren that don’t yet exist.
You’ve loved them so deeply, so completely, so devastatingly their entire lives and you’re scared, you’re so damn scared that it’s not enough. No matter what you’ve done or will do, no matter what you’ve said or will say — it’ll never be enough.
Perhaps they hate you that much.
And worst of all, deep down in your very bone marrow, perhaps you even think you deserve it. ♥