Words by Anwesha // illustration by Qiyue
When my son was about 3 months old, I decided to meet up with some mums from my parents’ group at a cafe. Life had been tedious of late, and it felt like the little break I needed. It also felt like a good little challenge. I’d usually have my partner with me when leaving the house with the baby, as I hadn’t been coping very well with his unpredictable moods. This would be my soft re-entry into the world beyond nappies and baby wipes. After all, I’d see these mothers with perfectly brushed hair and perfectly pressed pants going for brunches, visiting museums – even sitting at fancy wine bars while their babies snoozed silently in their carriers. I could be that mum too, I thought.
I pushed him along in the pram, and within five minutes he started crying. “Mummy’s here”, I said over and over, as I’d been instructed to say by a nurse over the phone in the early weeks. When we got to a park, I decided to check his nappy. After a quick change on the grass, we kept walking, but the cries kept getting louder. I was still a 15-minute walk away from the cafe, so I decided to sit at a bench and give him a feed. This worked for a bit, and we started making our way to the cafe again. Another few minutes into the walk, the crying recommenced, and I found myself sobbing, calling my partner to come pick us up. I have moved countries on my own. I have lived nearly half my life in a foreign country without any immediate family support. I have a so-called “good” career that got me “good” jobs that allowed me to purchase a property on my own in my early thirties. I have always considered myself to be a strong-willed and self-sufficient woman, and here I was breaking down while trying to make a casual coffee catch-up happen.
Things are not as dire as they were in those early weeks, but my baby still likes to keep me on my toes. Every moment unfolds through the anxiety of a hundred different possibilities. He could be calm, he could be energised. He could be content babbling away by himself with his toys, or he could be in a sudden urgent need of my physical proximity.
And therefore my attachment to the activity that I happen to be undertaking in those moments needs to be as fluid as his temperament. Whether that be cleaning up some dishes or writing in my journal or texting a friend – my involvement in those activities needs to be guided by a nimble attitude and a faithful commitment to my role as a mother that transcends my compulsion to see my task through to the finished product.
This elegant, unattached way of being has always eluded me thus far in my life. Some days, in the face of utter chaos, I’m left longing for that kind of graceful, Zen-Buddhist-like presence. Instead, I find myself frazzled, irritable, and defeated—upset that I didn’t finish the tasks I set out to achieve. My shoulders feel heavy with a sense of failure.
When this happens, I find myself wondering why I’m so attached to achieving whatever I’m doing at that moment. As various inspirational motherhood quotes like to remind me, my baby is only small once. Do I really care so much about how productive I was today? Does the cleaning need to be finished just this second? Does that book need to be read at record speed?
I realise how deep this impatience runs. It rises from within—decades of conditioning playing out in my everyday life as a mother, telling me that my worth lies in my productivity. And here we are, spending days, weeks, months doing so much but producing so little that is tangible, if anything at all.
As months go by, I become painfully aware that motherhood occupies a different dimension from the rest of our lives. The life of a mother often feels peripheral to the rest of the world. In a world that teaches you to measure your self-worth through how efficiently you can achieve your goals, motherhood flings that yardstick straight in the bin. We find ourselves doused in the unique flavour of self-doubt and criticism that seems to only be reserved for mothers. We’re left wondering, while time seems to have been warped into a non-linear shape, if our efforts mean anything to anyone at all, or if it’s just a futile exercise of an assortment of human instincts and impulses.
In many ways, motherhood does not have a “goal” – not an imminent one anyway. It just is. And one may embark on their journey by setting themselves a vague goal of being a “good mother”. But the concept of a good mother vs. a bad mother makes less and less sense the deeper you settle into the role. Something so inherent to human nature proves difficult to govern with extrinsic morals and imperatives. Perhaps, also, our typical societal measures of “good” and “bad” prove inadequate for the extraterrestrial world of motherhood.
Another puzzling aspect of motherhood may be the ambivalence that surrounds it all. An aspect of this plays out at times when I’m having trouble settling my baby boy. While I’m trembling with rage or sleep deprivation (often both), I find myself confusingly refusing my partner’s offers of taking over parenting duties, despite knowing full well that I need a break to get back to a regulated state. I feel a relentless push and pull within me – two parts in conflict – the part that wants to nurture my inner child, vs. the part that feels responsible for nurturing my baby.
Questions arise, such as – what does it mean to be a mother when you have no fuel left in the tank, when you have nothing left to give? Is it possible to be a “good” mother while not compromising on your pre-baby identity and values? Why do I still care about my pre-baby identity? Isn’t it my job as a mother to be a selfless being who gives unconditionally, while being bloody delighted about it?
I’ve been a huge advocate for therapy and personal responsibility in my life, but it seemed positively unlikely that these ideals about what it means to be a “mother” live solely within me. To treat this as a personal affliction, to say that I somehow dreamt them up from nothing, felt like a gross oversimplification.
I notice another occurrence that hinders having candid discussions about the reality of parenthood. When talking about the difficulty of parenting a baby, I sense an undertone of “You chose this”, often with people who have either chosen a different way of life, or are yet to experience the relentlessness of parenthood themselves. I myself have been guilty of this narrative.
I chose this – but did I? The more I think back to when I made this decision, the more I realise how much of it came from my body and not my brain. I felt an ancestral pull towards wanting a baby. I saw him in my dreams, I felt an aching pain for his presence. He did not come about as a result of a pros and cons list. The choice came from a “human” place within my psyche – almost as if it weren’t a choice at all. It feels like a primal version of me came forth one fine day and made this decision, imposing it upon the feminist version of me.
And while that’s beautiful in its own way, it adds a sadistic flavour to the suffering of early parenthood. The feminist part of me loves the control she has over her life and surroundings. She loves being in charge of my worthiness and how I earn it. She doesn’t put up with being treated unkindly; she knows better than that. She believes in self-care, nourishment and therapy. The indignity of motherhood was anathema to her. Motherhood, I learn quickly, depends on me letting go of all sense of control in my life, forgoing my historical worth in society.
Perhaps the biggest delusion I’ve had about motherhood pre-baby is that I could somehow fit the needs of both those parts into my postpartum life from the get-go, without any compromises. I thought that my “mother” identity would be something I could tack on to my existing life, like a nice pair of earrings to uplift an already complete outfit. I thought that those who let it compromise their existing identity were perhaps not trying hard enough. I didn’t realise that motherhood would feel more like something that not only annihilated the beautiful outfit I’d painstakingly put together, but also obliterated the meaning of fashion, and so I would have no point of reference from which to start building an outfit from again.
It made so much sense once I’d been through it – the all consuming nature of motherhood did not operate on an opt-in basis. Women weren’t simply letting themselves get consumed by motherhood, the survival of their children (and hence their own survival) depended on it being all consuming.
Interestingly, another paradox that comes up in motherhood is that being a “good mother” seems to be at odds with being a good feminist. Dedicate yourself to working; juggling the demands of your career with the relentlessness of motherhood, and you’re doing a subpar job at being a reliable parent. Why have kids in the first place if you can’t commit to the full load of it? On the other hand, dedicate yourself to being a devoted mother who gives her children undivided attention, and you’re a traitor to feminism, a patriarchy bootlicker. Our foremothers didn’t fight for our rights for you to settle on child rearing as your passion in life!
It is from the early days of pregnancy that I noticed this air of disdain towards my choices, both within me and externally. Being a mother is a low-status job. “I don’t know many people who are voluntarily having children nowadays”, said a friend upon finding out that my pregnancy was, surprisingly, not an accident. There was this sense that I had broken an unspoken agreement amongst modern women – to not give up our modern values. It’s interesting to note that these very values seem to have a distinct masculine quality to them. Because after all, it is a well-educated man with a good job who has the highest honour in this society. The burden lies on the modern woman to maintain the pretense that what really matters is martinis and cool clothes and Pilates and nice dinners and a fat paycheck. To give up our clout, our capacity to be valued based on our careers, seems like madness. Even though the discrepancy between how it feels and how you’re told it feels is glaring, the pact we have with feminism is to never question that this is the dream. Squash every doubt that this may not align with happiness.
I remember thinking, a month into home ownership and accepting an offer for the highest paying job I have ever had – how can the “modern woman’s dream”, once fulfilled, feel so empty? I had managed to convince myself for a fair while that being alone but self-sufficient was a fair alternative to being in a loving relationship. And while it felt easier to denounce romance and all the complications that came with trying to relate to others intimately, no amount of cool art and designer furniture in my luxury apartment seemed to assuage the emptiness in my life.
Which brings me to my question – if being a mother makes us irrelevant to society while simultaneously making us a pariah to fellow women; if it promises to further exaggerate a gaping gender gap, pushing us further and further away from the illusion of gender equality – how do we decide, as women, that the primal urge to be a mother is strong enough to let it annihilate all that we know about our identity and self worth, and place in this world? Is there a life that exists between the polarities of being an altruistic, self-effacing being that is mother and nothing else, and someone whose self-worth is generated from her capacity to be a good capitalist?
Nine months into motherhood, I’m realising that the intensity of these ponderings probably wax and wane through various stages of parenthood. And I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll have better luck looking inwards for the answer than out in the world.
