EXPERIENCE
From domestic goddesses to slummy mummies, society has always had something to say about motherhood. Laura Craik delves into what today’s ‘perfect mother’ looks like (spoiler: there isn’t one)
In 2006, I gave birth to my first child. Things didn’t go to plan. They rarely do. After a 36-hour labour and an emergency Caesarean, I was wheeled, shellshocked, into a ward I barely remember, my giant 10lb baby in a transparent plastic tray by my side. I tried to breastfeed. She wouldn’t latch. And so began the first of many failures that have been chipping away at my confidence for 17 years, for motherhood is the best and hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Despite one of the most talked-about TV shows of the year being Honey, We’re Killing The Kids, a warts-and-all view of family life that would have proved an effective contraceptive for anyone harbouring doubts about whether to procreate, 2006 was a pretty good year to become a mother. Sure Start, the Labour government’s 1998 initiative to ‘give children the best possible start in life’ was accessible and well-funded, while Mumsnet, launched in 2000, gave new parents access to a cor nucopia of advice via a platform that was mercifully focused on words and not pictures. While I struggled with early motherhood and felt oddly dissociated at times, I was fortunate to escape postnatal depression.
‘Why am I not feeling joyful?’ I remember thinking as I wheeled my Bugaboo down a particularly grim stretch of road. Had I spent my time scrolling through Reels of new mums in oatmeal-coloured co-ords with washboard abs, the transition from autonomous human to 24/7 caregiver would have been exponentially harder.
Instagram launched in 2010, the same year my second daughter was born, but by the time it had taken off, I was well past the point where every glowing depiction of motherhood felt like a personal failure. But long before social media existed, motherhood was being oversold – so much so that in the 1950s, it was touted as a woman’s sole purpose. The questionable construct of the 1950s housewife was an attempt to rebrand domestic life after women took on men’s jobs during the Second World War, enticing us back to the kitchen where we belonged and leaving the menfolk to enjoy their money and freedom. In the 1960s and 1970s, the women’s liberation movement attempted to challenge these prevailing notions of female domesticity, believing – quite rightly – that the dominant model of man as breadwinner and woman as homemaker was a source of women’s oppression. There was also a backlash against Mother’s Day, which many believed reinforced the problem. If motherhood is so satisfying, they argued, why not let men have a turn? The women’s lib movement also highlighted the invisibility of domestic labour – these days usually referred to as ‘unpaid emotional labour’ – and urged society
