Motherhood Isn’t Hell

Many years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter, Joanie, I recorded and uploaded some interviews with Jackson, who was three at the time, to YouTube. I must have shown him years later, maybe during the long stretch of Covid lockdown when we were all desperate for any kind of diversion. Enough time has passed since then that I forgot all about the videos until Jackson mentioned recently that he showed them to his friends at school one day. My immediate response was to apologize for having sharing these private moments on a public forum and to explain that the culture was a little different then and so was I and now I know better.

“I can delete them if you want.” I said.

“No, it’s fine,” he replied, “I like them – they’re funny.” And then he added, “You didn’t seem to like me very much.”

“What?! Of course I liked you. I loved you and I liked you. I thought you were so smart and funny and sweet.”

“Then why does it seem like you don’t like me?” He asked.

I had to go back and watch the videos and I don’t see it at all. I don’t hear or see what he’s talking about. I hear love and pride in my voice. But I also see a pregnant mom of a 3-year-old who had spent nearly every waking hour with her child since he was born and was about to do it again with a second and felt at once deeply charmed by her child and was also wondering what the fuck she was getting herself into. Those early parenting years knocked the wind out of me.

“That’s not me not liking you, Jackson,” I said, “That’s me exhausted. That’s me doing my best and always worried it wasn’t enough. That’s me before five years of therapy.”

Chappell Roan caused some controversy a few days ago when she said on a podcast that all of her hometown friends with kids under five are miserable. “All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I don’t know anyone — I actually don’t know anyone — who’s, like, happy and has children at this age,” she said after the interviewer asked if she wanted to start a family one day. She added: “I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”

I wonder if it’s the ten years of distance since I recorded those interviews with 3-year-old Jackson that I can look at the videos and see the light that maybe he wouldn’t recognize, that maybe someone who hasn’t experienced the unforgiving pace, tedium, and delight of early motherhood, wouldn’t see – some twinkle that reflects something more optimistic than misery? I wonder if it’s from the vantage point of ten years in the future that I can look back and better appreciate the sacrifices I made as a younger parent and see them not so much as soul-sucking but as seed-planting? Retrospection softens a lot of edges.

The other day I was having drinks with some friends whose kids are in eighth grade like Jackson is and, as you do at this stage in parenthood, we were expressing our disbelief over the speed at which it’s all going. Our kids will start high school in the fall and then, I mean, you have about five minutes before they’re off to college and then that’s it – it’s never the same again. Your family is never the same again.

We cried – my friends and I – well, we got teary, anyway, talking about this shared reality. And it’s not that we can’t imagine life on the other side. I dream about the lazy days I’ll have – spending my Sundays doing exactly whatever I want to do, making dinners a 9-year-old would hate, traveling to Italy in October outside any scheduled school break and eating gelato I don’t have to share. I dream of it, and my heart already breaks over it, because I anticipate the nostalgia, I already feel the nostalgia. I already miss my family how it is right now.

I hate the tension that the media – including social media – has so aggressively fostered, between women who have kids and those who don’t; it denies us our full range of emotions around each experience. I’m exhausted and bored with the seemingly never-ending ways we are pitted against one another, triggering us to defend our own experiences, defend our own choices, defend against analyses of perceived emotional states that don’t reflect our full emotional range or the scope of our own experiences. You can be stretched thin, overwhelmed, exhausted, AND happy in your choices. You can very much like your young children AND be looking forward to a different stage of parenthood (if you’re even able to imagine a few years ahead).

Maybe a lack of light in a mother’s eye isn’t misery or the indication of hell; maybe it’s simply exhaustion and the lack of perspective and proof that the seeds are, indeed, growing. But they do grow. If you’re a mother of children under five and you recognize yourself in Chappell Roan’s description of her hometown friends, please know that this stage will pass. I know my experience isn’t universal and we all have our own journeys and all that but listen, parenting little kids is a fucking beast and it gets easier. The physical labor of it eases. You get to sleep again. The seeds you’re planting now will grow. One day you’ll have a teenager and you’ll be counting the years on one hand that you have left together under the same roof, planning vacations around school breaks, planning vacations together at all.

I guess the other way to look at it is, if you relate to suggestion that motherhood is miserable, remember the Winston Churchill quote: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” You can’t turn back now anyway.