I thought I'd be the kind of mum who...
Are your expectations fuelling mum guilt?
We’re not fine (and we need to start saying it)
This Mother’s Day, this F*** Mum Guilt community came together for a raw, cameras-on, sharing-from-the-hear- to-a-stranger type chat. The best kind, IMHO. I ran with the theme “We’re not fine” because the data clearly shows that we’re not: 95% of us experience mum guilt and 50% of us in Europe are suffering maternal mental health challenges. I say these stats a lot because I think we all should.
I was right in there with some questions that made the mamas really think. Wanna play?
The question that cracked it open
OK, grab a pen and paper and complete this sentence, “I thought I’d be the kind of mum who…”
This cracked open a whole world of unrealistic expectations each of us had heaped on ourself. Personally, I thought I’d be the Earth Mother type, but when I saw a reel of a hippie mum dancing in the sunshine claiming the only way to bond with your baby is to spend the first 40 days in bed together, I realised it just wasn’t me. I mean my babies hadn’t even been discharged from NICU then.
Someone else thought they’d be the kind of mum who cooked homemade meals every night.
Someone else thought they’d be firing on full cylinders after mat leave, back to work with a full social calendar.
Spoiler alert: none of those things happened for us.
And we laughed together in recognition of what’s happening here.
The expectations driving mum guilt
Our reality is not the problem, our expectations are.
There are so many expectations placed on mums today, many of them start externally - perhaps from society (You can have it all, doll), from your Mother-in-Law (You shouldn’t co-sleep, I never did) or perhaps from social media (This is what motherhood is supposed to look like - if yours doesn’t look like this, you’re probably doing it wrong).
Yet bit by bit, like an unwelcome form of osmosis, they seep under our skin. Then we’re in real trouble because they become our own internal expectations of ourselves. We expect that we’ll be able to do, have, and be everything that’s been presented as “good mum” material. But we can’t, Mama. No one can.
The guilt gap
And when we inevitably fall short (we’re only human), we get stuck in the guilt gap.
Expectations on top.
Reality at the bottom.
Our misery and mum guilt in-between.
We all find ourselves here. One of the first steps of climbing out is getting real about what your expectations of motherhood were before you actually became a mother, then you can stop giving yourself a hard time for not meeting them.
Some of mine where honestly laughable, I thought I’d spend my mat leave travelling around Italy eating gelato, baby in a sling, climbing the Alps.
Reader, I barely made it out of my house.
Yet I’d still see all those glorious (if a tad smug) traveller mum posts and feel a bit “this is what you could have won”.
Over to you
Get really uncomfortably honest with yourself and share your answers to these revealing questions below:
What did you think motherhood would look like… and what does it actually look like for you?
Where do you feel the biggest gap between expectation and reality right now?
What’s one expectation you might be ready to let go of?
P.S.We need more raw conversations
If you want to be in the next room like this and part of real no BS motherhood conversations, or watch what happened in this one, drop me a message.
If this hit a nerve, you’re exactly who the F*** Mum Guilt community is for.
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