Happiness: The Hidden Motherhood Burden
Kids need a happy mom, but who has time to be consistently happy?
You probably didn’t realize this when you became a mom, but snuck in among the requirements in the contract you (never) signed when you took this gig is the word “happiness”.
As in, smile warmly at your children when they look up at you, be present, laugh, have fun with them, make jokes, be silly, join them in games of chase and pretend play — happily. Always happily. If you’re not happy, serious-and-yet-undefined things will happen to your children and your partner, and maybe even your home.
Everyone is depending upon you, not just for breastmilk and lunchbox items and pantries full of snacks, not just for rides to Nick’s house or a birthday present for little Meera from school before her party on Saturday, not just for stocking stuffers unique to each child at Christmas or the special gelt on Hanukkah that cousin Francie with the allergies can eat, not just for clean underwear in the drawer every day and jeans that fit even when the kid is growing an inch each month, but also for happiness; theirs, yours and ours.
It’s the ultimate double-bind: Our kids need us to be happy so we can create a happy home and give them a happy childhood — but the work of creating that happy home and raising happy kids makes it nearly impossible to be consistently happy ourselves.
If we’re not happy, they’ll sense it and they’ll worry. They’ll start reading our faces and our tone and our body language. As tweens and teens, they’ll mistake our unhappiness as resentment towards them. They’ll think they weren’t good enough. After all, if women are supposedly naturally happy as mothers and wives, doesn’t it mean they weren’t good enough to make us happy?
As a result, we assume they’ll become hyper-vigilant, develop attachment disorders and become codependent adults. They’ll date punks and marry grifters and have little attachment-disordered children with piercings who refuse to call us “Grandma”.
So we try to just be happy. Appreciate the little things. Find the simple joy in every day. We buy a hand-painted signs at the farmer’s market and hang them on the wall so we remember: Choose Happiness. Live. Laugh. Love.
But it’s bullsh*t.
Moms are struggling not just under our impossible workloads, but also under the demand that we must be happy — not just for ourselves, but for everyone else, too. What could be more high-pressure than hearing, “If you aren’t happy, your kids and partner can’t be happy, either” as if joy and life satisfaction are something we can just pick up at Meijer in an aisle somewhere between aquarium supplies and produce.
It’s bullsh*t and all this perfect-mom pressure is killing us.
It’s killing us through rising rates of heart disease (a 2019 study found heart attack rates dropping in older adults, but rising in women in their 40s), alcoholism (while alcohol-related deaths rose 26% among the general population from 2019 to 2020, they rose 42% among women aged 35 to 44), and even suicide (while men are still much more likely to die by suicide, women’s rates of death by suicide rose dramatically between the years 2000 and 2015, then leveled off, until rising again in 2021.)
Obviously, this isn’t all due to the increasing stress placed upon mothers in the 21st century (think: working outside the home while still doing the vast majority of the childcare and housework, a gendered gap that the director of the Better Life Lab called “grotesque”). There are plenty of contributing factors to these mortality rates, like access to healthy food and preventative medical care. But I have no doubt that increased stress and responsibilities are contributing to a less-happy generation of mothers.
Consider this: at the same time as we’re told that maternal happiness contributes to our kids’ well-being and should be prioritized, we’re expected to cater to our family’s every whim, even while our dinner plates go cold on the table. This unspoken expectation is so common, in fact, that moms who say publicly “I eat my dinner hot” are considered radical.
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While women like KC Davis (interviewed here at
) challenge the cult of the happy, tidy mom on TikTok with messy spaces and realistic expectations, picture-perfect mommy influencers with beachy waves and natural-look makeup still dominate parenting spaces. Ask Sara Petersen of , she wrote a whole book about the momfluencer phenomenon.Petersen says she’s been “low-key thinking about how the idealization of motherhood makes most moms’ lives shittier basically since day #1 of motherhood because it was immediately clear to me that diaper changing, bottle nipple washing, cheerio vacuuming, and playdate arranging was not the golden ticket to transcendence and whole-sale fulfillment I’d been promised.”
So, what actually happens when Mom isn’t OK?
I’m not talking about untreated mental illness here. Obviously we need moms (and everyone) to get the mental health care so many of us need. Untreated mental illness in a parent contributes to serious issues for kids who not only grow up surrounded by instability, but also without a model for how to handle mental health struggles appropriately.
What I’m talking about today are considered the “bad” emotions. The everyday icky ones. The ones not painted on Etsy signs. I’m talking about the kinds of feelings that come and go, like sadness, gloom, crankiness, pessimism, angst and apathy, just as a few examples.
Despite what your husband (probably) says when you wake up cranky, you don’t have to be happy all the time. The household’s well-being does not hinge upon your smile. You can be dark, depressed, irritable, and even blatantly apathetic sometimes — and you do not deserve to feel shame over that. If these periods get serious, you can ask for support from your partner and seek help, find solutions, and do the hard work to strike a fulfilling balance in your life and/or find the right meds and treatment.
Your partner or co-parent can step up and take over on bad days instead of asking that mom simply be happier. They can be the happy one, the joyful one, the most-engaged one for a day. They can do more work for a while and take over primary parenting responsibilities while you sort your sh*t out.
Despite what TV and social media and and probably your church says, your home can survive while you find your balance. Your partner or co-parent can join you in reminding your kids that nobody is happy all the time, and that even though you’re their mom, you are a complicated person with lots of feelings — just like all of us.
It’s not enough to do all the right things, we also have to be all the right things.
It’s too much pressure and likely impossible, anyway.
The truth is, our kids will benefit from us talking to them about the imperfect moments, the complicated moments, and the moments that make us human. Then, when they feel non-happy feelings, they’ll have a reference point for how to deal with them.
When my kids grow up and feel the darkness descend, as it does sometimes over me, as it did over my dad and over my grandma and even over her father, a stoic Dutch immigrant somewhere on a farm in Holland, Nebraska in 1900, they will know what it is, what to call it, and how to handle it.
I hope they will learn to say how they’re feeling and look inside, instead of turning it into anger and blaming it on other people or pushing it down until it becomes a festering wound. I hope they know that mood changes are normal and that they can deal with them and be happy again. I want them to know the truth, so I try to tell them, now, instead of hiding it or faking it. For instance:
“Mommy’s having a sad day, and I’m going to take a little time to work on my mood. I think I will take a nap and write a few notes in my journal and maybe take a walk to see if helps. But I love you and my mood is about me, not you, and I will be happy and silly again soon.”
Or, for older kids:
“Hey guys, I’m sure you noticed I’m feeling a little dark today. It has nothing to do with you kids, you guys are awesome. Honestly, I’m not sure why I feel so weird today, so I’m going to take a ‘down day’ and exercise and rest and call Grandma and talk about what I’m feeling and see if I can sort it out. Remember, no mood is forever and I’ll be feeling better soon. If I’m not, I’ll call the therapist and work it out. OK?”
Ultimately, as they say in the 12-step programs, our secrets keep us sick.
A mood or a vibe hanging around the house that goes unaddressed impacts people, too. A mom pretending to be happy when she’s not affects kids and teaches them not to trust people when they say they’re OK. It may even teach them that they shouldn’t trust their own feelings and interpretations.
I’m sick of this double-bind. I’m sick of impossible goals for motherhood. I’m sick of feeling like a failure because my house gets messy and my mood can turn dark. I’m ready for moms to be respected for all of the complicated, delicate, fierce, and nuanced parts of ourselves. After all, we’re human beings with our own identities, feelings and goals.
We don’t exist solely for our families — and it’ll be better for our kids when we all recognize and respect that fact.
Also read: I Took Antidepressants During My Pregnancy — Even Though I Knew The Potential Risks
Joanna Schroeder is a writer and media critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Esquire, and more. For links and clips, visit her LinkTree.
I'd say the idea that it's normal for anyone to be happy all the time is a distortion of reality. It's true that some people do have a more cheerful or despondent baseline disposition, on the other hand. But happiness isn't a goal or a gold-standard, it's a state of being consequent on variables that vary from person to person. Not something to be pursued.