You’re a mother. You are somebody’s mother. Though you may know perfectly well when and how this happened, you still look in the mirror some days and say “how did this happen????” You used to be young, energetic, carefree. You used to look forward to having children, but that was before you knew the truth about motherhood. Those longings are long gone as you stand in the wake of disaster every single day, shell-shocked and still trying to figure out why nobody told you it was going to be like this.
Oh sure, you knew the possibilities of sleepless nights with a newborn, but you decided it was a small sacrifice when you envisioned your little sweetheart, someday giving a deeply inspirational college graduation speech in which you are thanked profusely for all you’ve done. And yet, what nobody told you, for what nothing could have prepared you, were all the years in between.
From the moment that infant is placed in your arms, you are broken. Never the same. Your children can be your greatest strength, but also your greatest weakness. It is this pulling of opposite forces that you will spend the rest of your life trying to survive - joy and sorrow, contentment and restlessness, satisfaction and guilt, selfishness and sacrifice, acceptance and resentment, happiness and regret, love and longing.
Never again do you have the pleasure, the unappreciated privilege of having a single focus. You are forever divided. Broken.
You can have a good day, and feel fully capable of raising these children, only to have the stark reality of motherhood turn on you. Without warning you find yourself in tears, overwhelmed, burned out, without any hope for the future, your children’s or your own.
You feel defeated, and if that weren’t enough, those long-ago longings come back to taunt you - “But you wanted this child” the menacing voices in your head remind you.
Guilt. Only one of the enemies you’ll face in this journey of motherhood, but she tends to scream the loudest. Before you can even think of a weapon to use against her, she has you in a death-grip.
You don’t have a right to feel defeated, she says. How dare you say you’re overwhelmed, burned out, can’t take anymore.
Because you did want this child. Perhaps you planned your child’s conception. Perhaps the conception plan didn’t go smoothly and you went to great lengths, enlisting the help of fertility treatments, IVF, or even a surrogate. Maybe you hand-picked this child in an adoption process or whole-heartedly took over the care of children who would have otherwise been adrift due to some tragedy. Perhaps you never planned to conceive at all, but took on the responsibility with genuine desire once it presented itself. Or maybe the taunts of guilt are with you every day, for once, long ago, before you set about raising these children, you lost a child or even aborted a child.
And yet, here you are. Once again you are just trying to stay in one piece as the opposite forces tear at you. Yes, you did want your children. Yes, you do love your children. But no, you didn’t want motherhood to be like this. But it is.
Your expectations may have been unrealistic at the very least, or maybe your expectations seem more like a massive train wreck.
Either way, you are broken and you can’t go back. But I hope that this website will help you go forward.
We all have wreckedspectations of motherhood, but we’re in this together, or at least, we should be.
I hope you’ll find encouragement here, maybe a laugh just when you need it, inspiration, ideas to keep your sanity, and if nothing else, freedom from guilt. I know that you love your children. You know it too. But it doesn’t mean you love being a mother. And knowing that, sometimes, we mothers all need a little extra help loving ourselves.
