Mom Confessions: bad husbands, building a village, and struggling with infertility
because there is no such thing as a perfect mom
Motherhood can be messy, and only focusing on the highlights never made anyone feel less alone! Welcome to Mom Confessions, a space to get the hard stuff off your chest, hear from other moms going through it, and find solace in our shared struggles. Read on for anonymous submissions from moms just like you.
“My husband works non-traditional hours and days. I feel like nobody really understands how much of a burden it is to essentially run a household like this because even though I work full-time, I also do everything else for the kids and run the house since I'm the default parent. Other parents don't see this and I don’t want my children to feel deprived of doing things on weekends so I take them out a lot, but it's exhausting and hard to manage.”
“I resent how much more sleep my husband gets! He does not hear the monitor!!”
“When my 3 year old daughter has too much energy radiating in her body, she starts swinging or throwing toys (no amount of redirection works). More than a few times they have hit me in the face or eye. I say ‘ouch’ or ‘stop’ loudly. She abruptly stops, holds her head low, walks away, then sobs. I can’t bring myself to comfort her and I don’t want to comfort her…”
“Having a village is great but it comes with a lot of baggage! I'm constantly setting boundaries and trying to figure out what is actually serving us. At first, I felt SO lucky to have a bunch of friends pregnant and having babies at the same time as me. But once they hit crawling, their parenting impacts me and my kid. I have a good friend with a baby a little older and she lets him do whatever and throw Cheerios around. All fine in your own house, but Cheerios are a choking hazard for my kid. I have to be more vocal about what is not ok for us and it's so hard. I don't want to come off as criticizing. Do we just not have play dates any more? Like how am I supposed to deal with this dimension of motherhood when there are already a million other things going on and we are still not sleeping??? My ability to manage conflict is not where it used to be.”
“My husband and I struggled with infertility for years and after 3 hard rounds of IVF (and a stint in the hospital for internal bleeding after a retrieval gone wrong), we ended up with our miracle baby who is now 3. We’ve since had 2 failed transfers and another miscarriage trying to have a 2nd, and seeing women around me including sister-in-laws get pregnant so easily has been hard mentally. We have started the adoption process and also did another round of IVF, but I am so burned out from it all. Sometimes I wish this could all be past me. My husband has no idea how hard this has been on me—all while still managing motherhood and everything else that the responsibilities entail. It’s so easy for them to think “hey let’s have another baby” without realizing how hard it was on my body before and after and going through it again.
Counting my blessings, but to all the mothers out there, you’re doing a great job and if nobody else sees all you do, know that I see you. It sometimes is a thankless job. Thank goodness for strong mothers!!! Hopefully one day, our children will see it and remind you how important you are and how you sculpted your children into who they are today.”
Submit yours here.