This past weekend, my mom-of-two monologue went like this: I need to dig out the snowsuits. Do my 7-year-old’s boots still fit? Gosh, New York City looks so beautiful in the snow. Wait—that news alert says someone was shot in Minnesota. My heart is breaking. We are going to see my son’s first Broadway show—The Lion King—how fun. I need to pick up Aquaphor for the baby. Is Mufasa actually the villain of The Lion King? What do we do about real-world villains? What’s the number to call my state rep again?
All in a day’s work when it comes to motherhood, right? I’m here to definitively say, no way.
The pressure on moms—and parents in general—as they navigate daily life of child-rearing juxtaposed with an increasingly alarming news cycle is, to use the most overused word of the past decade, unprecedented. Yet parents keep waking up before the sun to pack lunches and say, “I love you.” Time that should be spent square breathing has been replaced with protesting and checking on our neighbors. If we were to measure the scale of our current worries, it’s off the charts.
Yet, we somehow keep showing up.
But is this sustainable? As I said to my therapist recently, “Every day, I take steps forward and hope that there’s solid enough ground to meet my feet.” And a recent New Yorker cartoon making the rounds in my mom chats accurately sums up our collective state: A child throwing a tantrum gets a single-word response from his mom. “Same,” the caption reads. After all, aren’t we full-on hypocrites for telling our kids to calm down when we feel anything but?
