I don't cherish every moment

What unsolicited parenting advice tells us about America's Ideal Mother

Last week, I was brainstorming good slogans or one-liners for Momfluenced book swag (like pencils, stickers, etc). The first one that came to mind was “Fuck Mother’s Day: we want systemic support” probably because my disdain for Mother’s Day knows no bounds. I came up with a few more before my brain started feeling sludgy and I asked Twitter for help.

sara petersen @slouisepetersen

What are some of the most infuriating things people have said to you re: motherhood? ("Cherish every moment")

I figured it was a pretty standard question; certainly one I had thought about with regularity for the past ten years since becoming a mom. After all, people start hurling infuriating (and unsolicited) comments at mothers as soon as they express any desire to even become parents. When pregnant, people commented on my body as if it was an interactive art exhibit. Many of these comments were innocuous enough (likely only because my body happened to conform to “cute pregnancy” ideals), but as someone who would often prefer going to Target or whatever wearing Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, I found the intrusion of privacy more cumbersome than any particular comment itself.

But anyway, I posted the tweet before lunch and checked in after lunch to see if anyone had responded.

People had responded.

Some comments were (darkly) funny.

“I constantly get comments on whether or not my kids are dressed warmly enough. LISTEN, ELVIRA OR JUNE OR LORRAINE, don't you think I had a conversation with my child about how Crocs are stupid in this weather? SHE'S FOUR AND I AM POWERLESS.”

“Lol, me on Twitter.”

“Commenting on their runny nose as if it isn’t a toddler’s life to have a runny nose for a year.”

Some comments were sad.

“Just the whole breastfeeding is natural BS. Like ya, I'm sure bleeding from our nipples is super natural and normal.”

“And also the whole breastfeeding helps you bond ‘better.’ I tried & tried, but wasn’t ever able to have breastfeeding success. I battled tons of shame & fear after my first because of that talk. But here I am, closely bonded with my 3 kids, even w/ lack of breastfeeding.”

“when my son was 6 months old and I was suffering from PPD my MIL made a comment that it must be nice that I was retired now.”

“In the depths of PPD, hallucinating from no sleep, body weeping from my c-section wound, someone said, ‘I know exactly what you’re going through. I remember when my dog was a puppy.’”

Some were dismissive.

“‘just wait until they're (insert any random ages between 1 and 18)’ because focusing on how terrible it might be 5 years down the road doesn't really help with severe sleep deprivation”

“It gets easier.”

“Sleep when the baby sleeps.”

“When I complained about breastfeeding for 50 hours a week, saying it was a full time job, my MIL said, ‘it’s the best job you’ll ever have.’”

Some were maddening.

“After commenting that I was exhausted because my toddler was having intense night terrors almost every night and my infant was still waking up to breastfeed: ‘This is what you signed up for when you had kids.’ Sure, but fuck off?”

“Though I was considered a ‘geriatric mother’ at 35, I looked super young back then. Some woman took me for a teenage mom somehow. Took baby Zoe out for a stroll one sunny day, both of us in protective wide brims. The woman sneered at us. ‘TWO babies in hats.’”

“When I was 8 months pregnant with my 2nd (the 1st was 16 months and not walking yet...) an elderly man asked what I did beyond 'playing mummy' because that certainly couldn't take all of my time.”

MANY were sexist.

“‘Aren’t you having children?’ Like I forgot.”

“Why did you bother getting married if you knew you didn’t want to be a mother?”

“(Looks at my two girls) ‘you’re in for trouble when they’re older’”

“‘Isn’t he a great dad? You’re so lucky!’ In response to man doing basic act of childcare for his own child. See also. ‘You’re so lucky he took paternity leave’… of approx two weeks with no long term financial or career impact.”

“From a colleague shortly after my daughter was born and I was back at work: ‘it's better for mothers to be home with their babies.’”

“while pregnant: 'I can see you're having a girl because she's stealing your beauty' I was having a boy”

Some of the comments shared were old standards (“Just wait until they’re teenagers!” “Little kids, little problems”) but many were new horrors (to me, anyway). So many comments about female fetuses “stealing” their mothers’ beauty!

A total of 679 people commented, and while I didn’t read every comment, I read A LOT of them, and I could either personally relate to each comment or at least wholeheartedly empathize (slash fume on the commenter’s behalf).

I was surprised by the enthusiastic response to this tweet (which was born from my lack of imagination rather than a calculated attempt to start any sort of parenting discourse) mostly because the question of “bad parenting advice” feels to me like pretty well-trodden territory. It’s something my friends and I have bitched about for years, and something that’s been well covered in “mom media.” Why then, did this tweet generate so much attention?

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In August 2012, I was a days-old new mother and suffering from not-yet-diagnosed postpartum depression. Instagram existed but I’m a late adopter to all technologies so only “used” Facebook. Blearily scanning the site for something that would make me feel alive, I saw a post about a baby.

“Meet our sweet baby Emma. She’s only a week old but I already can’t remember life without her.”

Below the caption was a picture of a baby being held by the baby’s mother. I can’t remember anything specific about Baby Emma or even if that was actually her name (nor can I remember who Baby Emma’s mother was). But I do remember registering this Facebook post as a personal attack even though it had nothing to do with me and was certainly not posted to communicate anything to me directly. It was a totally different animal, for example, from the MIL telling her DIL that breastfeeding would be “the best job she ever had.” Still, it eviscerated me.

Anyone observing my first weeks of motherhood would be forgiven for assuming things were “fine.” I found my baby sweet and lovable. I took pleasure in his soft cheek against my chest. My sister took a bunch of beautiful mother and child photos. It was all just as it should be.

I looked the part, right? Or do I look terrified?

I was also cushioned by a plethora of privileges as a first-time mother. My husband made enough money for me to stay home which provided financial security and saved me from the substantial mental load of figuring out how to cobble together maternity leave in the only wealthy country in the world without mandated federal paid leave. My mother stayed with Brett and I for three months postpartum. She woke up in the middle of the night to hold the baby so I could sleep. She told me it was normal to feel shitty. She held me when I cried (which was often). Friends and family visited. They baked us banana bread. They sent thoughtful gifts and cards.

My sense of alienation and dislocation first became noticeable (to me) when Brett and I left the parking lot of the hospital and headed towards home with our impossibly small baby in his impossibly large carseat. I watched with a sense of bewilderment as people drove in cars, walked on sidewalks, entered shops, and engaged in the activity of life. The looked like toy people in toy cars in a toy world. They looked like they knew where they were going and what they were doing and who they were supposed to be. Contrasting these scurrying people with myself, I could find no commonalities. I felt as newly born as my baby.

Once home, I went through the motions of mothering and wanted to do everything correctly, but I was bothered by the fact that I felt hollow inside. As the days passed, I felt more and more isolated in a cold, strange world but I couldn’t describe this world to anyone around me because as far as they could tell I lived in their world with them. Except I didn’t.

I floated, untethered to myself but ruthlessly fettered to the physicality of my new life. Pacifiers needing to be disinfected. Tiny brushes standing erect on little suction cup bases ready to clean breast pump parts. The scritch-scratch sound of a diaper being unfastened. Flesh colored nursing bras. The beige cord of the wipe warmer because of course I hoped the purchase of a wipe warmer would help. The drone of the sound machines, the ominous brrrrr of the baby monitor, the barely perceptible swish-swash of something we had dubbed the baby spaceship. The curls of overgrown newborn fingernails. The oily newborn scalp. Yellow-stained onesies soaking in the sink. A blood-damp, bunched-up menstrual pad. A stale granola bar sitting on my bedside table. The clock, ticking more slowly than it ever had before. The bifurcation of time: nap time, feed time, burp time, rock time, swaddle time, wake time, sleep time, tummy time, bath time, bedtime, changing time. Always baby time.

I still struggle to explain what my postpartum depression felt like back then.

I was bored, yes, but it wasn’t that. I was frustrated by my lack of physical autonomy, yes, but it wasn’t that. I was tired, yes, but it wasn’t that. More than anything, my postpartum depression felt like a slowly creeping, numbing realization that everything I had ever been taught (explicitly or implicitly) about motherhood was a scam. Motherhood was supposed to expand my world, but, as I tried to find myself floating in my bubble, it was obvious to me that my world had only shrunk.

I had not wanted to get pregnant because I was interested or curious or even invested in the act of caregiving. I had wanted to get pregnant because I wanted to inhabit an identity that promised to transform me, uplift me, fulfill me. I had wanted a baby so I would feel the “all-consuming love,” the “indescribable joy,” the sense of “completion” motherhood was supposed to evoke.

But instead, early motherhood made me feel housebound, intellectually starved, confined to the periphery of real life, and inflamed with shame and guilt that something within me was broken.

I thought of Baby Emma’s mother and reasoned she was doing motherhood right and I was doing motherhood wrong. She couldn’t remember life before Baby Emma whereas I could think of nothing but Before. Visions of my life pre-baby (freedom, laughter, showering without a baby monitor, sleeping without fear of a baby waking up, eating without fear of a baby waking up, profanity, adults, restaurants, loud music, conversations, weekend trips, conversations unrelated to nipple confusion, boobs that didn’t leak, books I had the attention span to read, late nights, unaccounted-for hours, lazy Sundays) haunted me with their inaccessibility.

As an American girl born in 1981, I was raised to believe that motherhood would give me everything I had ever wanted, but in those blurry newborn days, I was sure that motherhood had only taken.

I tell my postpartum depression story because I think my devastation upon reading about Baby Emma was a result of postpartum depression AND a result of being raised to worship at the cult of Ideal Motherhood. Baby Emma’s mom could not remember life before motherhood (or at least, so she Facebook posted), and this is what our culture wants from its mothers, to embrace and rejoice in the erasure of self. The Baby Emma Facebook post was not unsolicited advice specifically directed to me, but it was a reflection of a universal maternal ideal, and because I knew I was not conforming to that ideal, because I was a mother who could not only remember life before motherhood but LONGED for that life, the Baby Emma Facebook post felt personal.

I don’t think the 679 people that responded to my tweet viewed my question as at all new or fresh. I’m sure they had considered the question of bullshit parenting advise internally or with friends before. I think so many people responded because, despite the fact that our cultural conversations about motherhood ARE becoming richer, more diverse, and more inclusive of a variety of experiences, I still think many moms engage in the labor of mothering burdened by the weight of a cultural construct of what motherhood should be. And living in a world which prioritizes someone else’s should over your own truth is maddening, exhausting, and invalidating.

It’s difficult to assert (and sometimes, even to understand) our authentic maternal identities in a culture which determinedly foists a one-size-fits-nobody straightjacket of motherhood onto all of us.

At the grocery store, at the pediatrician’s office, on the street, at preschool pickup, in our homes, on social media, we are told by loved ones and strangers alike that whatever our maternal identities might look like or feel like to US is not as important as what our maternal identities look like or feel like to someone else. And even if we don’t respond to an unsolicited mom comment with a defense or an explanation, even if we ignore the comment altogether, the delivery of the comment itself reminds us that our own realities and experiences are considered secondary (to the individual commenter and to society at large). None of us want to believe our own realities are secondary though, so we consciously and/or unconsciously expend energy trying to simply inhabit our own skins. This becomes exponentially more difficult, of course, for mothers with intersecting marginalized identities.

I specifically directed my tweet at mothers (versus all parents) because American fatherhood is not nearly as culturally loaded as American motherhood, and fatherhood as identity marker is not as freighted as motherhood as identity marker. This is why momfluencer culture is a multibillion dollar industry and why dadfluencer culture is not.

If a father is seen accompanying his Croc-wearing kid to the park on a snowy day in February, he is more likely to be given an indulgent smile than an unsolicited PSA about Crocs not being appropriate for a snowy day in February. He’s a good dad because he’s with his kid at all, you see, and since he’s a dad, he’s also not expected to know that Crocs are an objectively bad choice for a snowy day in February. Mothers, on the other hand, should be with their children as a given, and they should always know better. Because they are mothers.

And the thing about all the bad parenting advice lobbied at mothers—whether well-meant or not—it’s all the same in that it assumes one universal maternal reality, it shrinks the myriad experiences of motherhood into a single Hallmark platitude.

America is crystal-clear on who the Ideal Mother is, but profoundly uncurious about individual mothers’ individual experiences. So is it any surprise mothers will jump at any and all opportunities to assert our personhood? To speak our individual, unique, maternal truths? Even if it’s just through a tweet.

Generalized mothering advise erases all mothers and upholds a false ideal.

This Ideal Mother savors every moment, sleeps when her baby sleeps, considers breastfeeding her greatest accomplishment, laughs blithely when told her unborn child has stolen her beauty, believes in the sanctity of her maternal instinct, approaches her third pre-dawn hour bouncing a screaming, colicky baby on a yoga ball with energy and delights in the fact that they’re only little once, smiles and shrugs after her toddler tantrums about his bread being cut the wrong way because wait until he’s a teenager, is charmed by every word her child utters, is intellectually riveted by lunchbox packing, quits her job immediately upon being told a mother should be at home with her child, is grateful to the stranger who suggests her child might be chilly because it had never before occurred to her to consider the physical wellbeing of her own child!

The Ideal Mother imagined by givers of generalized parenting advice is never you. She is never anyone, because she has never existed and never will. But she is maddeningly, stubbornly powerful; she is everywhere and all at once.

Tweets like mine will always “perform well” because American mothers are experts in their own maternal experiences but given paltry opportunities to share our expertise in meaningful ways. When it comes to our daily lives, for example, our expertise is considered entirely irrelevant. This is not my opinion - it is fact. If maternal experience and expertise were considered valuable in America, we would all have access to quality, affordable childcare. We would all be able to have children without fear of losing our jobs. We would all be able to give birth without fear of racist, classist, ableist, anti-fat mistreatment. We would all be able to feed our families. We would all have access to safe housing. Paid leave would not only be federally mandated, but it would give us ample time to adjust to the mental, emotional, physical transition of parenthood.

If we lived in a world which assumed a mother’s individual experience had meaning and value, mothers of newborns might wear their exhausted expressions at the grocery store without fear of somebody telling them to smile because it all goes so fast. If we lived in a world which assumed a mother’s life was meaningful pre-baby AND post-baby, we would not smile in approval when reading about Baby Emma’s forgetting what life was like before Baby Emma. We would be chilled.