MOM’S GUILT: A jarring reminder that we are failing new mothers!

What can we do?

Year’s back, when I found myself sitting in front of a new mother I had worked with, who was a medico herself and had been well prepared, yet seemed to be at her wit’s end since “everything and everyone around her, including her baby was so perfect, yet she found herself feeling bad.. how horrible was she?”, I remember thinking, nothing else could make the mom’s guilt so real.

Research says, a whopping 94% of moms reel under parenting related guilt! That percentage should be more than enough to shake us all out and try to collectively do better for them.

So, what is mom’s guilt? 

Nothing can be helped without understanding it better, so that should be our first step- educating ourselves.

The internet loosely defines mom’s guilt as: a name given to the feelings of guilt and shame some people feel when they don’t live up to their own or others’ expectations in their role as a parent. 

However, if we have to be honest, it isn’t just limited to “role as a parent”. It possibly extends to many other associated roles, mostly connected to one’s household too. But once a baby enters the dynamic, the guilt definitely becomes manifold.

Let’s look at another statistic: Only 50% of dads feel that they are not doing enough as a parent.

Hence, the problem - our assumed gender roles run so deep in our understanding that we are conditioned to take them for granted. So much that when they are not met, women do not wait for anyone else to put them down. They get weighed down under the guilt of these roles themselves and make sure that they convince themselves that “we are not doing enough”. 

Society needs to be accountable!

Unfortunately, people around also put enough pressure on the mothers usually, to reinforce this sense of guilt by placing the blame of practically anything that may not seem to be going right for the baby.

“He’s too clingy, you hold him too much”, 

“she cries a lot, you do not hold her enough”, 

“how did she fall sick, you must not be paying enough attention”,

“he is becoming stubborn, you are giving him too much attention”. 

 Basically any and everything is the mother’s fault.

Role of Fathers?

On top of the above, since the gender roles for fathers are usually different when it comes to children or even household work, their absence, while overlooked at best, their little presence in child rearing is more often than not applauded as if it is extraordinary. While some fathers may themselves not be the ones doing it, the treatment of the situation as a whole by the environment(more often than not) further strengthens the belief of a mother already doubting herself that she really is not enough.

The Result

All in all, while all that the woman/mother does is trivialized, the man/father doing their own work is often rewarded. Somehow the role that falls in the man’s kitty, that of being a provider, in itself comes with a reward of a salary that he earns as compensation that in addition to providing for his family usually gives him the validation and comfort of adding value to his work. It won’t be wrong to say that he feels encouraged then too. Besides that, his “labor” is also often more recognized than a woman’s, who is not only denied of any compensation for doing the role falling in her kitty, regardless of the labor it may require, her faltering in doing the what is often known as “basic” is looked down upon more than it is ignored. Furthermore, if it happens due to a career that she may be pursuing, add a few more dollops of judgment, a lot of it which may come from her own self.

Is it then such a surprise that generation after generation women keep finding themselves reeling under the relentless weight of the mom’s guilt?

It almost seems like the same reasons that put one gender on a pedestal, somehow pull the other one constantly down and like was mentioned in the beginning, the conditioning runs so deep that most of us are prone to keep running around in that circle constantly.

That brings us to the main question that we must be asking at this point. 

How to ensure that mothers, or people who are around mothers deal with it in a manner that it gets controlled, if not eliminated?

Firstly, identifying it definitely goes a long way, for only when you identify a problem is when you go about solving it. So if you are a mom, ask yourself how you treat your own self in the kind of situations mentioned above? How many times do you see these so-called “domestic failures” as your personal failure and not the failure of the couple as a unit? If you are the partner or someone witnessing the journey of these moms, encourage them to ask these questions. If the answers show you that you are carrying it- first step is to accept it as a problem.

Second step is to accept yourself as an individual who also needs and deserves to be prioritized just as she usually is doing for her family, baby/ies or loved ones. However, prioritizing oneself is easier said than done. It takes a herculean effort to win over your natural instinct to push yourself and your needs to the back burner. Take breaks. Conscious, deliberate ones. Talk to yourself. Check in, like how you would check in with the people you take care of routinely. Allow yourself to accept that you need to be cared for and be happy, not just to be able to care for others and make them happy (since that is what you are usually trying to do), but because as an individual you simply deserve it in isolation too. In fact, as a mother whose mind and body has gone through months and then years of stress in order to carry, birth, feed and then take care of your baby, you possibly deserve it more than anyone else. Remind yourself constantly, that it is not just okay to do it, it is essential. For you shouldn’t just have to survive, you should be able to thrive! 

You owe it to yourself and there is no guilt that should stop you from doing that.

Rinse, repeat.

For people around a new mother(lets extend it to women in general)- first and foremost, please do the same- see her as an individual first. An individual, a human, who is in the process of life changing events that are going to extend over a period of time. So instead of constantly expecting her to do things, focus on how to do the ones you can for her and other times, help her to do them.

Next step- possibly one of the best things you can do for her is to avoid comparing. To your own self, people around her or even other mothers. Everyone has their own unique journeys. So instead of comparing, shift your focus to honoring theirs. A lot of supporting them actively involves just validating their work or issues, listening to them without judgment and reminding them that it is okay for them to seek and take help. That times have changed and so families/couples/parents are units with equal stakes and responsibility in their lives which definitely includes parenting too. 

Rinse, repeat.

How we treat our mothers would always and always go a long way towards shaping the journey that our children(any gender) will have in their lives and if raising the next generation with the right values is not important, we can’t say what is.

We are sure we missed a lot of things here since Mom’s guilt is so vast and so nuanced. So, we would love to get your insights about it over comments and raise the right kind of discussions, since they really are the need of the hour.