Something’s gotta give: when doing it all is impossible.
I consider myself most of the time to be a living embodiment of chaos. Motherhood is my highest value and I berate myself constantly for not doing a good enough job. But while I see myself as just treading water at best, I have been surprised by friends and even my own mother saying to me in admiration, “I don’t know how you do it.” I probably don’t even need to explain this discrepancy. It’s a tale as old as womanhood. We are far more critical of ourselves than we are of others. We also see every mouldy crevice of our own lives but only the manicured front lawn of our friends’.
I will elaborate, however, because one of the lessons I’ve learned since becoming a mother is that something’s gotta give (not always, but often) and I want other mums, especially new mums to understand this concept and learn to go easy on themselves. If we can generate a broader awareness of reality rather than running these stories - “I’m just not organised enough”, “Why don’t I have the capacity that other mums do?” - I believe we can start to focus on our strengths and, more importantly our potential.
Before I go any further I will remind you motherhood is hard enough without adding to the to-do list. Sometimes posts like this, even when they’re designed to take the pressure off end up adding one more ‘to-do’ to a mother's list: “Broaden awareness and focus on strengths - check ☑️” I am guilty of all the no-no’s of feminism: comparison, self-shaming, ‘should-ing’, holding others on pedestals, expecting way more from myself than I do from any other mother, forgetting self-care, martyring myself, all of it. And self-help is my drug of choice. It is exciting and full of potential…and can paralyse me too. So please go easy on yourself. I write personal musings and about research I find fascinating. I don’t write in order to instruct, because you’re the expert on you, not me.
Anyway! I’m a bit of ‘scrunchy mum.’ I love the image of the linen-clad mother of five in the yard with her kids and chooks. I aim to be sustainable and embody nurture parenting but I’m also human. Here are some of my qualities that seem to impress people: I often make my own bread, goodie balls, sometimes my own yoghurt and muesli bars. When I get the urge or a friend has a baby I make bone broth in the slow cooker. I also make a great pasta sauce from scratch. I freeze excess and deliver to friends when I can. They receive these gifts with too much gratitude and wonderment at how I have the time.
I study part-time - just one subject per trimester, plodding along so that one day I can become a registered psychologist. For a little while I did this without any childcare for my daughter. When she stopped napping at 2.5years I put her in family daycare one day a week. My friends still marvelled at how I got it all done with a toddler at home nearly full-time. I took a break while my second child was tiny. I managed to start up again when he was 6 weeks old and still scraped together top marks (it was a shock to me too!). I took another break after that because the subjects were getting harder and even now I still have baby brain. Find me a mother of a baby who can handle lessons on electrons and nerve impulses and I will buy her a wine (she’d be needing it!)
I decided to become a postpartum doula at the end of April, 2022. Within a month and a half I had finished my doula course, registered my business, built my own website, enrolled my son in 2 days of daycare and had begun! I’m speedy at that type of thing. To me, the behind-the-scenes stuff is easy. It’s getting out there doing face-to-face networking that is the challenge. I mean, any mother can start a business if they have an iPhone, a fridge full of snacks and ABC Kids, right?
I’m on a roll now, listing all the things I am (or at least appear to be) good at. Here’s a nifty one: I usually wear a face of light make-up (I know, amazing right?!). For some mothers this would be nothing to brag about, just a fact of life. For others it’s a ‘bravo’ for me as I strut the catwalk - I mean kindy verandah - for morning drop-off. To be ready for the day by 8:30am in an outfit that makes me feel good, a face that reflects how I want to feel, and my hair in a carefully curated top knot is a literal pat-on-the-back-level achievement.
Ok, so now imagine I turn up to your mothers group dressed nicely, make-up done, with my homemade goodie balls in one hand and my toddler in the other. I talk about choosing nurture/attachment parenting, feeding my boy throughout the night and co-sleeping with both kids. I mention I’m studying and have started my own business. You ask if the kids are in care and I say “just two days.” You’re looking at the earrings that match the outfit, the healthy fruit and veg snacks appearing from my toddler’s lunchbox, the stories of homemade banana bread and talk of the latest parenting book and -
I can feel it already, the next question is resting on the edges of everyone’s lips -
“how do you find the time and energy?”
Well strap yourselves in folks, ‘cos you’re about to hear about all the mouldy crevices (literally) in my life. All the unfinished tasks and head-in-hands moments that fill my day, but also make it possible for me to do the things I love. Because like the title of this post states: somethings’s gotta give.
The first something to ‘give’ in my house is always the actual house. I CANNOT keep this mother-effer clean or tidy no matter how much I try. I use a cleaner irregularly when it gets in top of me but when we’re sick and can’t have anyone enter our germ-filled space it becomes the stuff of nightmares.
Mould in the bathroom sink
A floor that may have been vacuumed at some point but never ever mopped
I rifle through mountains of washing to find a single pair of undies and settle on the stretched out night undies with holes because ‘mount washing-ton’ got the better of me.
Every chopping board we own gets piled by the kitchen sink because my husband and I both hate washing up.
Veggies going squishy in the bottom of the veggie draw.
Kids puzzles being destroyed by the toddler so instead of being packed up we just leave them out for him to tear up over the course of a few days then straight to the bin.
A pile of dirt in the front yard that was meant to be moved into the garden three weeks ago.
Windows I can’t allow in photographs because the kids’ greasy finger marks all over them prove that I have not once washed them properly.
So when I bake bread for a friend and she says, “I still can’t believe you make your own bread on top of everything else you do. How do you manage it all?” I answer her, “I don’t remember the last time my toilet was cleaned. That’s how I have time to bake my own bread.”
The next out the window in favour of studying and running a business is exercise. I truly love yoga but gosh it is hard to find the time and motivation for it. When I hear other women talk of their daily yoga practice I breathe a big sigh and wonder why I can’t get on top of my own routine enough to fit in even a good stretch. My muscles ache for it!
I see those Instagram posts, “your 10-step guide to good health” and I struggle to tick off even one or two from the list. No daily exercise, no mindfulness or journaling, and I definitely don’t drink enough water! Beating myself up about it doesn’t help. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s just adding to my deficit on step 10 - ‘stress less.’
My kids aren’t sleepers. They just aren’t. I no longer seek advice or answers or try to ‘fix’ it because I’ve completely resigned to them just being kids that aren’t capable (or don’t want to) sleep through. When people praise me for being able to stand upright, let alone run a business and study while I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in over 4 years, I remind them that at 7pm when the kids are asleep I don’t utilise that kid-free time like I know I should/could. I know this is when other parents exercise or tidy up, journal or spend quality time with their partners. I collapse into a heap on the couch with my husband and we watch an hour of ‘Blown Away’ before the toddler wakes up crying and I say, “stuff it, I’ll just go to bed now.” Sometimes no one cleans the kitchen or tidies up the day’s mess. We regret it in the morning and I sigh, thinking, ‘other people aren’t so gross and lazy.’
But that’s just it. Other people are so gross and lazy! Haha, no, none of us are lazy and one of us are gross. The floor might be gross but we are not. The truth is one person diligently cleans their kitchen nightly but wishes they had time for a long bath. Others will ensure they are well-groomed at all costs, keeping their underarms hair-free and their moustache…what moustache?! I don’t mind my legs resembling a forest but I will not leave the house without my brows touched up.
When we stop believing other mothers have it all sorted and instead realise that we are all making choices, conscious and unconscious about what we spend our time on, that’s when the magic can happen. That’s when we can start focusing on our own strengths and give ourselves high-fives for what we do achieve in a day instead of what we don’t.
I actually fantasise about communal living. A commune of parents and kids in which everyone’s needs for cleanliness, childcare, nutritious food, leisure, etc are met. Because each individual, with their different strengths, helps the others. I’ll make bone broth for everyone and someone else can tidy up the mess….I mean, heaven?
The truth is we weren’t meant to do everything. The older I get the more I realise we absolutely are meant to live communally. Rather than looking over the neighbour’s fence thinking the grass is always greener, we’d be walking through the neighbour’s door with a cup of sugar and eggs from our backyard chooks and they’d use them to whip up some biscuits for all the school lunches.
If you’re about to become a parent, it’s time to mentally prepare for the surrender - surrender to not having as much control, to having to sometimes choose between two things you want, and to being ok with not having everything ‘done’. And most importantly, to understand that the grass is not greener, it’s just different. And we’re all in this together anyway, it’s not a competition for who can ‘do it all.’
We don’t want to tear each other down, looking for people’s faults so that we can feel better about ourselves. But we also don’t want to put others on pedestals, assuming that what we see at the local mums ‘n bubs yoga is an accurate depiction of their daily life behind closed doors. We are all doing well in some areas, and need support in others. The more we open up about where we feel a sense of struggle, the more we can actually support each other and lend each other our ‘talents.’ I’ll bake you bread any day of the week and you can remind me to drink water and pick me up for a yoga session.
No one, alone, can do it all. But together there is so much potential.
