As wonderful and rewarding as being a mother is, there are sure to be moments that make you question your sanity and wonder how the hell anyone has gotten through motherhood, ever.
When Australian blogger and mother Constance Hall hit this point, she asked her father how her grandmother had dealt with 11 children. In a now-viral Facebook post, Hall wrote about her father's response, and how it exposed the pressures that modern mothers have to contend with.
"Once after having 1 child I asked my dad how on earth my nanna did it with 11?" she wrote. "My dad responded that she wasn't given half the pressures I was."
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"She didn't have to go to the bank, the supermarket everyday, she wasn't expected to look a million bucks straight after birth and she never put pressure on her kids to have reached all of their miles stones by the age of 3 weeks, have the house clean and own a thermomix," she continued. "She just hung out with her kids and enjoyed them."
Hall also pointed to the pressures and responsibilities of our modern life as a distractor from spending time with our children and being present with them.
"To go to the gym, answer that email, pay that bill, cook that organic kale, blend it, get it into a patty so no one knows it's kale, get to the doctors.... The washing! Petrol in the car.... colour your god dam greys! Make the kids lunches cos if you order them again you will be JUDGED!" she wrote. "Meanwhile we are losing the time to be present with our children, half listening to them, preoccupied, nodding along while our brains are thinking 'fuck now Video Easy is taking legal action on that $12 fine.'"
While moms shouldn't have to feel guilty for being busy or preoccupied, Hall's post makes a great point about how much we judge and shame mothers if they don't seem to "have it all," or even have it all together. Of course, moms like Hall's grandmother had their own struggles, just as moms today have their own unique pressures. What matters in the end, as she wrote, is taking a breather every once in a while to truly enjoy your time with your kids.
"Today I woke up with a desire to take a deep breath and let it all go, I don't really care about the new blinds I had ordered or making the house decent so that my mates don't think I've lost the plot," she wrote. "But I really care about my time with my kids and how they feel about themselves. And I'm not going to let outside pressures and "Super mum" ideals take that away from me."