In Defense of Motherhood

Take my money, wreck my Sundays

Welcome to The Purse, a newsletter about money and women and motherhood and careers and all that good stuff!

Ahead, I’m writing about motherhood and Mother’s Day, which I know is not everyone’s jam. As I write in the essay, it’s a super complicated topic that dredges up a lot of feelings. This essay might not be for everyone, but it was important for me to write. 

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Where are all the happy moms?

Do happy moms make happy moms? (And yes, my mom is the absolute chicest!)

I’d been planning to write an essay about the joys of motherhood for a while. And then last week, we got lice. All of us: Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear. I pretty much lost a whole day of work after my kid was sent home from school early with this gross diagnosis. We spent hundreds to have a nice lady come and wash and comb our hair, and then we did hours of laundry and vacuuming and stuffing dozens of stuffies into plastic garbage bags in an attempt to clear our apartment of these life-sucking bugs. It should go without saying that lice infestation is not among the joys of motherhood.

But that unfortunate episode has not deterred me. I think motherhood has got a really shitty PR team right now, and I’ve got a few things to say about that¹.

As a mother and a general consumer of pop culture, I feel like we’re living in a sort of Golden Age of Motherhood Media^TM. There are all kinds of moms depicted everywhere. Open a book, scroll social media, turn on Netflix, and you’ll find nearly every kind of mom you can imagine: wine moms, soccer moms, expecting moms, trying-to-conceive moms, cartooning moms (So. Many. Good. Cartooning. Moms.), working moms, trad moms, stay-at-home moms, back-to-the-land moms, depressed moms, harried moms, activist moms, political candidate moms, novelist moms who write late at night when their babies are sleeping, football moms, swim team moms, any-sport-you-can-think-of moms, absentee moms, ambivalent moms, lawyer moms, corporate moms, doctor moms, nature moms, free-range moms. Who did I forget?

But when I look around, I’ve noticed there’s a narrative about motherhood that’s missing: happy moms.

What I don’t see very often are women sharing accounts of what they like about motherhood². The good parts of this messy job that so many of us go to extreme lengths to achieve—we’re talking spending tens of thousands of dollars to conceive and risking our lives to give birth. And I’m not talking about core memories or other kinds of made-up social media bullshit that somehow ends up backfiring and making us feel bad. I’m talking about the real stuff. The fun stuff. Why don’t we talk about that more? I worry that in 30 years, our kids are going to look back at this particularly prodigious period of Motherhood Media and worry about all the grief and pain they caused us. And that makes me sad.

In preparing to write this newsletter, I went down a rabbit hole reading essays about motherhood (and there are many out there). I started with the thoughtful essay “I Speak for the Housewives” by

Amelia Morris

, which led me to Merve Emre’s review of Mom Rage (which I didn’t dislike as much as Morris did), and from there I read “The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering,” a recent essay by Jessica Grose, and that led me to Molly Jong-Fast’s review of Heidi Reimer’s novel The Mother Act.³ And there was a line in Jong-Fast’s review that stood out to me:

“I like any book that tries to grapple with women having mixed feelings about motherhood, since it is considered such a third rail of American values; you must love it, or else.” 

I disagree. At least among my circle of friends and the writers I read and the TV and movies I watch, in this day and age, it’s normal to be skeptical of motherhood, to regularly list off a litany of complaints about the burden of this role, how it strips women of their identity, prevents them from creating art, destroys their careers and marriages, sucks their youth, and leaves them husks of their former selves.⁴ Like I said at the beginning of this essay: Motherhood has a terrible PR team.

Admitting motherhood can be wonderful and fun and rewarding. Now there’s a third rail. 

In writing this essay, I’ve been thinking about why that might be—why we aren’t allowed to admit that motherhood is fucking awesome? Last night, while washing my face, I was listening to Kate Kennedy’s newish book, Once in a Millennial. In the intro, Kennedy talks about feeling shame about her hobbies: “It was such a source of tension for me internally, feeling like a fraud who cares about all the wrong things in life and worrying their shallow nature meant I wasn’t sophisticated or intelligent.” And while she’s writing about her love of pop culture, I feel like she could also be talking about motherhood.

For whatever reason, it’s become taboo to admit you enjoy being a mom, that you find purpose and even inspiration in it. If you do, you must be an overprivileged trad wife who’s fallen for the patriarchy’s lies that motherhood is a higher calling, a ruse to keep us pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. Our culture is overrun with the narrative that once women become mothers, they lose their identities, and their new reality is sad and pathetic and that’s why they must consume so much wine.  

But I love being a mom. I’m not always great at it—let’s be very clear about that. Sometimes I yell. I don’t enjoy playing make-believe, and I mostly leave the work of crawling on the floor and pushing Hot Wheels around the rug to Ken and the grandparents. Sometimes, I can get very caught up in my work and have a hard time focusing on what my son is saying. I think Minecraft is so boring. And while working on this essay very early Tuesday morning, my son got up before his alarm, and I almost cried in frustration at the lost 30 minutes of writing.

Yet, these large and small annoyances cannot cancel out how incredible it is watching this person I made with the help of my husband grow up. I could talk all day long about how wonderful he is—how smart and funny and beautiful and kind. I am a heart-eyed emoji for him. Thankfully, Ken and my mom are always game to talk about our number-one obsession, scroll through photos of when he was a teeny-tiny baby, or trade stories about the funny and cute things he does. Truly, I don’t think Ken and I ever laughed so much before we were parents, and Ken is a very funny guy.

I’m not saying it’s always perfect—not even close—but every day is guaranteed to contain at least a moment or two that make it all worthwhile: watching him make a good play at little league, overhearing him telling his papa a silly story, the feeling of his hot little hand in mine as we walk to school. He’s lying next to me right now while I write this essay, and I still can’t believe this beautiful boy is mine—at least for right now. (Also, I wish he would go in the living room with his dad, so I could have a moment of peace.)

My Instagram feed has been littered with memes using a lyric from the new Taylor Swift record: “I cry a lot, but I’m so productive.” “Moms can relate!” is the general consensus⁵, and I can, too. I’ve certainly shed many tears over the years while getting a lot of shit done. But there’s a lyric in the new Maggie Rogers song⁶ “Don’t Forget Me” that also reminds me of motherhood:

Take my money, wreck my Sundays
Love me 'til your next somebody
Oh, but promise me that whеn it's time to leave
Don't forgеt me

I’m trying my hardest to savor these long days knowing very well the years are short. The first seven have certainly flown by. I know my time with my child is fleeting. One day, if we are lucky and all goes according to plan, he will leave the nest, find a partner, settle down, and grow his own family, hopefully bringing with him a flood of memories of his happy childhood. This boy is definitely taking my money and wrecking all my Sundays, but I hope when he’s grown, he won’t forget me.

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When I was in my early 30s and trying to decide if I even wanted to have kids, worried about how it would disrupt my ambition, my career, and my marriage, my mom said, “Well, what else are you going to do?” And while some people might argue that’s a crazy reason to have kids, I also think she’s on to something. If we’re fortunate, life is long. And it stretches across many different phases: childhood, young adulthood, mid-life, and old age—with many smaller stages scattered throughout. Ideally, you find meaningful ways to spend your time across all the phases. To quote the Byrds and the Bible, “To every thing there is a season…”. 

So why not spend 20 or 25 or 30 years raising a family, sharing inside jokes and private heartaches and long car rides and minor illnesses? Sure, the kitchen may never be clean, and the laundry may never be done, and some weeks, you might spend an unexpected $300 on lice eradication. But what you get in return? I was struggling to put it into words, but then I saw an Instagram story from the writer

Maggie Mertens

, with a photo of her two sweet little boys dressed in PJs and superhero capes, with the caption, “Because we all need this kind of love and joy and innocence today.”

We are living through an incredibly difficult time, with so much sadness and uncertainty in the world. Wars rage. The Earth is warming at an alarming rate. Our country is facing unprecedented political division. Women’s basic rights are being repealed. There are too many guns, and there is so much poverty. It’s no wonder that mothers despair—that all of us despair. And yet, many of us also find that having children inspires us to try to make the world a better place. Becoming a parent has not dulled my ambition but sharpened it. No one should underestimate a mother with a mission. She might cry a lot, but she’s productive.

Yet this essay isn’t just supposed to celebrate motherhood because it can inspire altruism. I wanted to try—and I worry I didn’t fully succeed—to express how much fun it can be. Raising a child can be so silly and sweet, and yes, some doors close, but also your world expands in a million ways.

I want this newsletter to be a celebration of mothers. Not just traditional moms, but aunts and cousins and sisters and work moms and fairy godmothers (I have a particularly wonderful fairy godmother!) and best friends and even the dads who step in to mother. Let’s celebrate the joy and the fun and the wins!

Moms: Use this comment section to share what you love about motherhood. Go ahead, gush about your child! We want to hear about the students of the week and the early readers and the good eaters and the sweet, sweet children who light up your lives.

Everyone else: Use this comment section to share a story about your wonderful mothers (or the people who mother you, as

Caroline Cala Donofrio

put it so beautifully in her last essay). 

And if you don’t have anything nice to say (as moms everywhere like to remind their children), don’t say anything at all.

Forget that this is another bullshit Hallmark holiday and give moms what they really want. (Nope, you can’t find it in a gift guide.) Let’s make this a love fest! Shout praises from the rooftops. And when you’re done with that, let’s get back to work on pushing for federal paid family leave so life can be a little bit easier for moms across the U.S.

With that goal in mind, for every new annual subscriber who signs up between now and May 31, I’ll donate $5 of the subscription to The Chamber of Mothers, an organization that unites moms to advocate for a better America.

And a big Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, who is my inspiration and my motivator and my number-one fan. She taught me you can be both an ambitious career woman and a good mom, and our strong relationship allows me to both parent and work (mostly) guilt-free.

1.  I feel obligated to add a couple of disclaimers:

1. Yes, it is incredibly difficult to be a mother. I’m not trying to diminish that. And perhaps we make it even harder in the U.S. than it is in other countries, what with our sky-high maternal mortality rates and our lack of paid maternity leave and affordable childcare. But I believe it’s hard everywhere because simply the act of conceiving, giving birth, and then raising a child (or children) takes a ton of work. And it can be lonely and confusing and heartbreaking. Thankfully, there are many smart women writing on the topic. Start with Jessica Groses’s Screaming on the Inside:The Unsustainability of American Motherhood and go from there.

2. I recognize I’m writing this essay from a place of privilege. I have a smart and healthy kid (knock on wood) who has a wonderful father who shares this load with me. My parents live nearby and provide a lot of support. We have the means to afford childcare. I’m also not in the thick of raising a little baby. If I had sat down to write this in the early days of motherhood—that foggy time of anxiety and raging hormones and so many sleepless nights of wondering if I would ever feel like myself again—this would have been a totally different essay.

2. I do think

Joanna Goddard

does a really lovely job talking about all the different sides of motherhood, and I’ve always really enjoyed the posts she writes about her kids, especially the series Toby and Anton in Conversation, about funny things her boys have said recently.

3. The two New York Times articles are gift links, but I’m afraid the New Yorker review is behind a paywall.

4. Diary of an Honest Mom has nearly 700k follows on Instagram + Reese Witherspoon’s seal of approval. I don’t think honest conversations about motherhood is exactly niche these days.

5. Loved the memes from The Mother Chapter.

6. I love her new record so much.