I’ve always kind of hated the sappy idea that kids are wonderful and everything about them is puppies and rainbows.1 I’ve also always hated the idea that motherhood should be all-consuming, for all the reasons

My experience of my children’s very early babyhood was work: sometimes fulfilling, but mostly just exhausting. I resented the exhortation to enjoy every minute, and the idea that everything I did could make or break these tiny humans. Sometimes you just get by and call it good when everybody is alive at the end of the day (screens, junk food, whatever—my kids still talk with joy of the day I said I was in a “screw it” mood and took them to Cold Stone for lunch when we were out and about). Sometimes you make the choice about what’s good for you, not them. (Though that is quite often the same thing.) They are not, to my knowledge, permanently damaged by that meal of ice cream.

So let’s ditch the parenting (mothering) pressure.

(Quick aside: on a kind of flip side, teenagers get a bad rap. Technically we only have one at the moment, but the other two are close enough, and so far I think they’re great. Way better than babies, hands down.)

Of course, raising kids of any age is also not nothing but drudgery, and it’s an error to swing too far away from puppies and rainbows. There are plenty of narratives out there that make motherhood or parenting or caregiving in general out to be much worse than it is. There is certainly not enough social support for caregiving in the United States, so the attitude is understandable. But beyond (and related) to that, some of the attitude surely has to do with the strands of feminism that stand up for the idea that women should not have to be confined to the home and all the care duties that come with it—and enjoy it to boot. Maybe it also has something to do with happiness culture, the impossible expectation that we’re supposed to be happy all the time and we’re doing something wrong if we’re not.

But (as I tell my students all the time), it’s complicated.

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Erica Lucast Stonestreet

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September 12, 2024

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I realized that while we used to diminish care with shallow, sentimental praise, we are now diminishing it with ceaseless complaint. Where is the acknowledgment of cargiving’s complexity, or cargiving’s might? …I wanted to talk about it, unpack it, examine it, to take it apart and put it back together all with the goal of better understanding how care can change us and the world around us for the better, and why it’s been ignored. (16-17)

For some time I’ve been thinking of care as a powerful framework for approaching human nature and ethics.2 But I hadn’t been thinking of it as expansive on a personal level. It was just what I did, because having created little humans, it falls to me—and of course My Dear Spouse, and the network of caregivers and supporters that we’re lucky enough to have3—to keep them alive and thriving.

Multiples are extra hard, of course, and The Twins have probably overwritten my memories from The Boy’s babyhood. He was an easygoing sort, still is. Even so, I’m pretty sure I didn’t experience new motherhood as any sort of revelation. Unlike Strauss, I don’t think I really experienced care as expansive. It was just what I did.

Care was “just what I did.” So ordinary that I didn’t think about it as a practice of caregiving, really. It was entirely focused on our own situation and how to make everything work. Yet eventually I found that actively identifying as a MoM helped reduce cognitive dissonance and find meaning4 in the struggle. At first, I was doing the caregiving actions because I had to, but not feeling it as rewarding. It took away from some of my other identities to an uncomfortable extent. Leaning into the role helped me to get the meaning out of the experience in ways I don’t think I would have otherwise—much like Albert Camus’ interpretation of Sisyphus. It took my love for (all three) kids in conjunction with the support of an online community of MoMs and the community of support we had locally to be able to see myself as a MoM, with everything that meant, including how it shifted the way I framed the burdens. But now I can see all of this under the broad umbrella of a practice of care.

Care can be understood in several related but distinct ways. It’s an attitude, a value, work, but also—As Virginia Held wrote in her 2006 book The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global—a practice. As a practice, care incorporates the aspects of attitude, value, and work. This is what I see now as I reread an essay I wrote on this:5

As my love for my twins deepened and crystallized, I became more and more invested in them as the little people they were, and more and more invested in being their mother. I hated all of those 3:00 a.m. wakings, resented being the one to have to get out of bed, and I often felt bored during the day [while on leave], which meant that the prohibitive difficulty of going anywhere made me feel trapped. Yet at the same time I wanted to do the night waking, the daytime playing, and all the rest because I was their mother. Over time, loving them made me receptive to everything mothering them meant…. Despite all of the struggle, I was (am!) proud of being a good mother to them—one who is attentive and dedicated and does all of these difficult things for her children because she loves them. I was doing the work of caring for them first of all for their sake, of course, but also increasingly for my own sake, because over time, a MoM came to be who I was—even more prominently and deeply than my identity as a mother had been when I had only my singleton.

Identifiying as a MoM—weaving that identity into myself with but not instead of my other identities—helped me to engage in The Twins’ care as a practice governed by norms and values I accepted as my own. It was undeniably taxing—and it was very good.

While it’s true that happiness is in the mix for me, it’s important to emphasize that this is the happiness of eudaimonia, which is about flourishing rather than “mood” happiness. Even with my children in their second decade, which I’m enjoying immensely (in part because my identities have rebalanced a bit and there’s more room for non-MoM/mom me, and in part because they’re actual people now), there are still many things about caring for them that are not fun. Revisiting this has reminded me about the experience in ways I can draw on as I shepherd Twin B through her medical journey, which has been hard on all of us. But being in relationship with one another is a meaningful experience, one that’s deeply engaged with some of the most important values there are: attentiveness to others’ needs and interests, emotional support, receptivity to the reality of others and our interdependence with them, love, and care. It isn’t always happy. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

Happy Mothers’ Day.

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