When we’re told “You can have it all”, we hear “You should be good at it all”

How this myth is leading to mum guilt and misery

(pic: me at Ideas Fest delivering this idea to a tent full of mamas)

This is for you if you’re

• trying to do it all, spreading yourself thin and holding yourself to an impossible standard across all of it.

• done with chasing “perfect mum”, but still feel guilty that your home, career, body or relationships don’t look quite as good as everyone else’s.

3 Generations of female entrepreneurs

When my grandma started her first business in East Africa in the 40s, no one told her she could have it all. She had to steal it and hold on to it like a rugby ball whilst everyone else tried to take it away from her.

When my mum co-founded businesses in the 80s and 90s, she was begrudgingly allowed a seat at the table, but only if she dressed and acted like the guys. She could be a second-in-command but not run the show.

Yet by the time my triplets were born, and I’d been running my book publishing business for 10 years, the message had changed to a beautiful, glittering mirage…You can have it all.

Now this is a handwritten invitation to mum guilt. Somewhere along the way, “You can have it all” stopped sounding like freedom and became an expectation.

Frankenmum shows us what “all” looks like

Frankenmum (intro’d in the clip below) is the fictitious benchmark we’ve stitched together from all the visual proof points our brains have clocked on social media

On one level, we know Frankenmum isn’t real. In fact, none of her component parts are real. They’re only a few curated and filmed seconds from one mum’s life.

But nonetheless, we compare our home to Interiors Mum’s, our abs to Fit Mum’s, our balance sheet to what Six-Figure Side-Hustle Mum just told us she made during naptime.

My mum didn’t grow up seeing an endless stream of interior-designed nurseries, post-natal bodies that bounce back instantly or women apparently earning their entire income during naptime. If she encountered a mum like that, she registered as the exception.

Now our brains are being convinced it’s the norm. And that we’re sub-par.

That’s the danger of Frankenmum.

Our brains bank all those reels as proof points of what “good” looks like, then arm mum guilt with a tonne of evidence that we’re just not good enough.

Mum guilt will parade these mums before us like a cheesy game show host and say, “Look, look what your family, your partner could have won.”

We have to admit that she looks pretty good.

“You should be more like her,” mum guilt adds.

Instantly, whatever we were feeling proud of doesn’t feel anywhere near good enough anymore.

We sigh and say, “Yeah, I wish I was a bit more like her. I wish I knew how she did it.”

This leaves us deflated and demoralised.

When possibility becomes pressure

The problem is not just that Frankenmum is showing us the infinite and impossible scope of what “having it all” means from a successful career to a pretty nursery to organic nutritious meals to hot date nights. It’s not even that what she illustrates is too much work for any individual mum to realistically squeeze into one day/life.

The real problem is that she does it all so damn perfectly.

I was recently on Mums Mean Business podcast discussing the expectations Millennial mums carry into motherhood.

We were raised with a huge expansion of possibilities: get the education, build the career, earn your own money, have the family, travel, stay fit, have a beautiful home, maintain your friendships, keep the relationship alive.

The truth we face is that we cannot even get it all done, let alone be perfect at it.

That was something I had to radically accept in the early days of triplet motherhood.

Accepting I couldn’t do it all

You would not believe the workload involved in looking after triplet babies: the laundry, the cot changing, the nappy changing, the bottle sterilising, the feeding, the winding, not to mention how long it takes to get each of them to sleep. It’s more than one person can fit in a day.

It hurt me to accept I that I couldn’t do it all, let alone do it all of it well. I was barely surviving. I thought I’d be more on top of it all. I was used to being good at things, but triplet motherhood was something else.

I remember going on Instagram when my babies were little and thinking, “Am I the only one getting this wrong? Am I the only one whose kids/home/holidays/car etc. doesn’t look like that?” Even the other triplet mums managed to get their babies in matchy outfits without any of the spewing up. How???

We cannot have it all. We cannot be it all. If you disagree, please leave a comment. I’m here for the conversation.

But we can intentionally design a motherhood that works for us, makes us happy and aligns with our own values. Not your mother-in-law’s. Not your friends’. Not an influencer’s. Yours.

I’ll be digging into this next week. I’ll help you get hyper-focussed on exactly what matters, what you want to prioritise and what you’re happy to totally drop (and let’s be honest taking the pressure off and ditching a few things feels liberating). Do you already know what you want to ditch?

What’s one area where you’re DONE trying to be a perfect mum?

Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading. I write unapologetically about breaking up with mum guilt. Subscribe to do motherhood on your terms.