How mother's day keeps mothers invisible

​As mother’s day approaches in Australia, a day when society elevates mothers to a position of  admiration and respect, I can’t help but think about how invisible mothers remain the rest of the time. 

In Victorian times, mothers were kept hidden in photographs with their babies, posing as chairs, curtains and other paraphernalia. These mothers are easy to miss, but once you 'see' them, you get that unsettling feeling that perhaps things haven't changed all that much. Mothers are still invisible in today's society. 

Leora and Leota Lamb, twins from Fountain City, Indiana, on their mother’s lap, 1897. Image courtesy of the Indiana Album

The motherhood experience is one largely relegated to the home, the private sphere, where it is kept unseen. Work, business, achievements, men’s issues, policy and politics are in the public sphere, but motherhood is stuck squarely in the private sphere, with challenges related to it being treated as personal issues rather than societal and public matters. By virtue of motherhood being treated as a woman’s private domain, the reality of modern motherhood remains largely invisible.


The maternal mandate dictates that, just by virtue of being a woman, having children is what a woman should want. It is seen as the natural order of things. A woman who decides to remain childless by choice is seen as suspicious and odd. There must be something wrong with her.


But it is not enough to want to have children. You are expected to have them early in life. Should you decide to have children later in life, your choices are questioned, as you are constantly reminded of being a ‘geriatric’ mother. You may have more life experience and be a bit more savvy than you were in your early 20s, but, then, the message goes (in a circular argument), you should have known better than to have a child late in life. Geriatric mothers, alongside women who are childless by choice, are dragged out into the light as an example of what one should not do.


When a woman does have children, she is expected to find motherhood natural, easy and instinctive. Nothing to see here. Business as usual. The proverbial maternal instincts will kick in, she is told, despite the fact that research has shown that there is no such thing as an automatic-maternal-instinct switch that gets flicked the moment you birth a child. Instead, there is a restructuring of a mother’s brain that primes her for motherhood, but this priming of the ground requires learning by experience and example.  Thus, leaving mothers to handle it all alone and in private makes no sense. As anthropologist Dana Raphael pointed out in the 1970s, long before neuroscience research debunked the myth of maternal instincts, 'giving birth does not make a mother out of a woman.'   
 
Still, the picture of the woman taking to motherhood effortlessly and easily is prevalent and highly visible. It is treated as something she should be able to navigate alone, with little to no help, behind closed doors. She will know just what to do, just because she is a woman and, should she struggle, this is taken as reflecting her own individual flaws and failure rather than as part of the normal, natural motherhood experience.

She is expected to be the perfect mother who sacrifices herself and her needs, not just for basic needs such as sleep, healthy nutrition and exercise, but also for social connection, purpose, personal passions and interests, as her needs are supposed to be met entirely met by motherhood. She is expected to run the home and do the million and one invisible things required to ensure the smooth running of family life effortlessly and with a smile on her face, silencing any difficulties she may have. 
 
The mother who is utterly sleep-deprived, who is far too busy to eat a proper meal and only has time to pick at the kids’ plates, who never rests and has no interests of her own and no social life is celebrated as a good mother who puts her children first and herself last. She is not in the picture. Again, nothing to see here!

The reality of the relentless physical, mental and emotional demands of motherhood is kept invisible. As actress Emma Thompson once said talking about having children, given the gap between the idealised picture of motherhood and the hugely unrealistic expectations society has of mothers, ‘if I had known, I am not sure I would have had them’.  
 
Ideally, the mother will stay at home looking after the children, the only thing that she should care about. Given the current climate and modern society, she may have to go to work and earn her share, but work should never be seen to interfere with her children and her ability to be a good mother. She has to be seen to be holding it all together.

Many people still balk at a woman daring to breastfeed in public, many still arguing this should be done in private. A good mother should keep a spotless home for any potential visitors to see, irrespective of how depleted and exhausted she is.

 
At work, she  may be shamed and accused of slacking and 'leaving early' if she has to collect her sick children from school (the private sphere of motherhood inconveniently impacting the public sphere of work), and of not pulling her weight because the hours that she will put in late into the night to catch up will remain invisible, along with the many hours of unpaid domestic and emotional labour she performs weekly. Her struggles will most likely remain silent and invisible.


A mother’s worth is measured by how well her children behave in public and how much she is seen to give them. This was recently illustrated by interviews in the mainstream news in which some psychologists advised parents of the psychological and emotional damage of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) sustained by children who could not get tickets to a Taylor Swift Australian concert or whose parents simply could not afford such tickets.

Many of my clients expressed the guilt they experienced at not being able to buy such tickets for their children, thinking they were failing them. Showing how exhausted and how guilty she feels at not doing enough for her children seems to be an acceptable public display of how much a mother sacrifices herself.  We celebrate the martyr mum.

As mothers navigate later years, beyond being exhausted, they are expected to have bounced back and are actively discouraged from expressing publicly that they are struggling, that motherhood is really hard. 'You chose to have kids' or 'why did you choose to have kids then?' being regular silencing techniques.

Mothers are kept in constant check by the dominant parenting ideology that demands that they dedicate all their time, money and energy to their children and by reminders that attachment must be constant and all-encompassing, despite research showing that it is a consistent lack or complete denial of close, sensitive care in the early years that can impact a child's development.

Still, mothers are expected to reach perfection, as the message remains that she is utterly responsible for how her children will turn out . She must remain invisible and dedicate herself entirely to her children at all times. Cue more mum guilt!
 
This idea of perfect, easy motherhood into which we are all socialised continues long into motherhood. As parenting and the home are seen largely as a woman’s domain, she is expected to handle the vast majority of childcare and household duties. Having a lot on does not even begin to describe the load a mother carries.

Clients often report that, when fathers/partners help,  it is not uncommon for them to take on the visible parts of domestic labour such as laundry or dishwashing, whilst the mother still carries the bulk of the invisible mental and emotional load.  

This perecption that motherhood should be natural, easy and instinctive, that there is such as a thing as a perfect mother, that no other public display of motherhood is acceptable means women internalise the idea that there is something wrong with them, that they are at fault, that they are broken and need fixing when they struggle.

As a result, they take on more to prove they measure up, only to become even more depleted and feel even more invisible. The unrealistic picture of motherhood stops them from advocating for themselves and from asking for help for fear of being labelled as bad mothers.

Should mothers express any kind of dissatisfaction with motherhood, their love for their children is questioned.  A loving mother should only experience bliss and joy. If she experiences anything else, she is told she can't love her children enough. She is seen as a bad mother. More guilt!  

When a mother does muster the courage to ask for help, oftentimes, she will be told that she is depressed, whether she feels that way or not, and that she needs to go on medication. All agency is taken out of her hands. There is little space for her to be heard and for her reality to be truly seen. Advice offered will tend to be baby centric. Again, she is invisible.


Just like that, mothers are kept invisible and silent. Social forces and the pressure to conform reinforce social norms and gendered expectations and stop us as a society from considering that the system is rigged against mothers, that treating motherhood as a private matter contributes to silencing mothers' realities and to increased rates of depression and burnout,  that the status quo fosters an undoing of mental health and wellbeing that is passed on to our children, both girls and boys learning that this is what it means to be a mother. 

Ultimately, we are socialised into the idea that motherhood is pure bliss and joy and that experiencing anything else is untoward and wrong. The ambivalence that characterises it is rarely acknowledged or mentioned prior to motherhood. 

If pure bliss and joy are what mothers should feel, then, why are so many mothers struggling with anxiety, anger, resentment, burnout, guilt, shame, self doubt, feelings of inadequacy, isolation and depression? This is the reality of the many mothers, educated, intelligent women who love their children, that I see in my practice week after week.

Were the symptoms, struggles and challenges of motherhood be treated as normal effects of the major hormonal, psychological, social, economic, spiritual transition that childbearing and motherhood (not just new motherhood) actually are, it is likely that rates and levels of depression as well as isolation, burnout, feelings of inadequacy, anger, guilt and shame would drop. For that to happen, the reality of modern motherhood experience has to be made visible.

On Mother's day, we celebrate the sacrifices mothers make, we show appreciation for all they do, although others rarely know all that mothers actually do, and just like that, we reinforce the idea that sacrificing yourself is how you get recognised and temporarily appreciated. And the next day, it goes back to how it was.

Perfect motherhood is revered, but real motherhood is invisible and unvalued. Celebrating mothers one day a year reinforces how invisible mothers are. 

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