My Concept of Motherhood Has Always Been Muddled. Then, I Became a Mom

Here’s what becoming one taught me about what defines Motherhood™.

Jun 03, 2024

I’m excited to share a guest essay with you this month. The author is my lovely friend Valerie Pierce, the brilliant creative behind the paper goods store Kindred & Co. I’ve know Val for a long time (since my freshman year of college!) but we really connected as adults, both meandering through lives in creative pursuit. This piece came about after I had put out a call for guest writers to talk about joy and beauty in any way they chose, and Val had mentioned she had been contemplating motherhood. Or, as I view it, the Motherhood Industrial Complex™. AKA, the cultural and societal expectations of what it means to be a mother, the veneration of motherhood/parenthood and the endless (and endlessly exhausting) stream of highlight reels on social media. For those of us who don’t subscribe to the idyll and ideal of Motherhood™, what does that mean? Here, Val wrestles with something the world tells us should come naturally, and invites others to do the same.

By Valerie Pierce

“How did you know you wanted to be a mother?”

I wanted to exude confidence to my thoughtful college ministry student who sat before me and yet, only anxious thoughts filled my mind as she blinked patiently waiting for the answer. To be clear, she was only asking for her own understanding as she herself explored the topic of eventual motherhood. She had then appropriately reasoned that I, as a mother, might have a clear answer for her.

I did not. My answer was likely mumbled, and coated in ambiguous theoretical ideas because I was unsure of the answer myself.

My motherhood journey has never been clearcut. It started with a disconnected feeling throughout pregnancy to the role I would soon carry and the small human growing inside of me. In the early months of my daughter’s life, the joy I had hoped for was laden with a thick fog of postpartum depression and anxiety, impossible to see past until I fully emerged from it a year later. Hidden underneath my immediate reality was a dysfunctional upbringing within my own family which made motherhood extra confusing.

I looked to others around me to help define motherhood. What made someone a mother? What does being a mother mean and look like? How should one feel about motherhood?

However, the answers I felt and saw online did not match the story I was living. The ever-feminine, ever joyful, ever grateful, hard (but only like 2% of the time), and general highlight reel aesthetic, wasn’t my experience. The moms with multiple littles who seemed to always want more, who recorded videos of snuggling chubby cheeks to the acoustics of “You are my Sunshine” and who always shared a hard story with a strong “but I couldn’t be more grateful or happier with this life” type of refrain felt disingenuous. My motherhood experience wasn’t that, so were they being (or rather presenting) as delusional or was I missing a key piece of inside of me that left me less than a mother?

But surely, some rational side of me thought that just because the answers I was seeing weren’t my lived experience, didn’t mean I wasn’t a mother. I have the stretch marks to prove otherwise. So I wondered, what would other mothers (in the broad sense of the word) say what being a mother means and what motherhood looks like?

It can feel scary to show the raw, mundane, and imperfect sides of motherhood, especially your own imperfect story of motherhood. Not to mention the unspoken pressure or expectation social media places on moms to show up as physically put together (your kids and you), intentional with every life detail, and only grateful for the journey. But motherhood should be honored in all its forms. So I’ll start. If I could go back to that conversation with my 18-year-old college student, this is what I would have said instead.

Being a mom is a beautiful mess. It has its joyful moments where your cheeks hurt from smiling and laughing watching your little break it down in the middle of a wedding dance floor; and your eyes glisten with tears of pride as she heads off to her first day of real school, carrying a backpack the size of her entire body.

It has its challenging moments where your mouth is set in a tight line to prevent rude words from erupting when the battle to get dressed for the day reaches its one hour mark. Or tearful eyes when said words have erupted and you need to reconcile. I’ll never forget the moment I yelled at my daughter and slammed my hand on a counter in frustration only to immediately regret it as I saw the tears in her eyes and she saw the tears in mine, even with anger still bubbling.

It has days of only difficulties, where joy is a literal fight. There are days where the mundane can border on boring. Or when the tasks and expectations from all parties (yourself included) feel endless and overwhelming.

It’s full of “I love you,” “I’m sorry,” “I’m proud of you” and “will you forgive me?”

It’s full of beginnings and endings. First steps in the world and last steps in the home a child grew up in. First conversations with a social worker and a case file and last moments in your home before returning to another mom. First timid interactions with one another to tearful farewells as one moves away from the other.

Motherhood spans this spectrum of moments and all the mundane in between. Actually—it’s mostly the in-between. The not this or that, but the ambiguous middle of “both and.”

So I’m setting out on a journey to invite others to consider: What does being a mother mean to you? I doubt I’m the only one who has questioned and struggled. And I wonder whether having a multitude of ideas and experiences just might lighten the weight of motherhood from a one-dimensional view. I wonder whether such breadth might allow others to more freely express their lived motherhood stories, with its complexities, simple moments, beautiful, messy, and downright hard. Without the need for any qualifiers or caveats.

Val is working on a project compiling diverse stories of motherhood, which will live as a series on her blog. If you’re interested in sharing your own definition and story of motherhood, you can reach out to her here.

What I’m Reading

“The Art of Survival: In living with cancer, Suleika Jaouad has learned to wrench meaning from our short time on Earth.” - Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic
“On English Melancholy” - Iris Moon, The MIT Press Reader
“How Not to Be Bored When You Have to Wait” - Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic
“So Was Body Positivity ‘All a Big Lie’? If thin is in again—and we have “miracle drugs” to get us there—can we still love ourselves at any size?” - Samhita Mukhopadhyay, The Cut
“Before Palmer Penmanship” - Katrina Gulliver, JSTOR Daily

What I’m Writing

The Precipice

I’m super excited to share the first interview from my new series, The Precipice, will drop at the end of the month! The subject: the incredible poet and artist Hope Curran Lundblad, who is turning 30 in July. She writes the newsletter, Hopefolio, has worked with a gallery representing the likes of Andy Goldsworthy and Ai Weiwei, and holds a master’s degree in fine art from the Sorbonne. Who better, I thought, to speak with about beauty? Stay tuned—and if you know anyone about to enter their next decade (and it can be any decade!) who’d be an interesting interview, send them my way.

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