Which mothers are allowed to be visibly exhausted?
An easy study you can do today from home to find out
Everyone knows the work of motherhood is exhausting. Everyone. All people know this. (Okay, I may be rounding up.) Motherhood exhaustion is depicted in commercials, TV shows, movies, and we see it in the mothers around us.
So, why doesn’t every mother feel socially comfortable revealing their exhaustion? Why do some mothers feel like they need to pretend harder to “have it together”?
If you are a white, able-bodied, slender, partnered, upper-middle-class mother, you’ve probably never noticed that we are among the women who are most called upon to depict a clichéd exhausted mother in liberal media.
We are the women who are “allowed” to show up at school drop-offs in pjs and have it be cute.
We are the women who are portrayed in commercials and movies as comically harried.
Motherhood is what levels us as approachable if we let ourselves be visibly taken over by the slog of it. “We might seem to have it all but look at us—we’re unable to enjoy it. We’re too tired! Don’t hate us!” It’s the wealthy white mom version of the 1980s Pantene hair commercial where the woman with billowing ocean-wave hair says, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
We are the women who are allowed to temporarily fall apart because we have enough positive assumptions made about us in our wider dominant culture. We “purchase” these positive assumptions (also known as social capital) with our other forms of capital.
It works like this:
If you have enough money, then the exhaustion you let yourself reveal or perform can’t be because you “irresponsibly” had children while poor. Therefore, your motherhood exhaustion is valid motherhood exhaustion. It must be because the job is legitimately difficult.
If you’re able-bodied and healthy, your motherhood exhaustion must be valid, and not because you “irresponsibly” had children while disabled.
If you are partnered, then your exhaustion is valid and not due to “irresponsibly” having children while single.
Mothers who don’t have the attributes of the most dominant class of people in our society, mothers who don’t have the attributes of the most powerful in our society, don’t feel like they’re “allowed” to show they’re struggling. They feel like they will be scrutinized and regarded with contempt if they let themselves look unkempt, exhausted, frustrated, depressed, or angry.
And they’re right, they will be.
How do we know this to be true?
I’ve had hundreds of conversations and debates with right-leaning people online and in real life, over 15 years, people who are skeptical of social inequality. They sometimes talk like left-leaning recognition of social inequality is simply a trend called “wokeness.” And that wokeness offers trendy narratives we accept as true because they spread like conspiracy theories. And they spread like conspiracy theories because some people initially were loud, repetitious, and threatening enough.
But this “wokeness” is simply sociology—the study of social change, social lives, culture, and human behaviour. And sociology is a scientific field.
As such, we have ways within sociology to measure and study social inequality and culture:
we can do surveys
we can analyze and trace property ownership
we can do psychological studies that measure unconscious bias
we can look at adoptive twin studies to see how twins adopted out into very different homes turn out
we can look at language usage and evolution
we can analyze media
and so on…
So, speaking of media, here’s a fascinating exercise you can use to prove my thesis here.
Go to iStock.com.
Search for “exhausted mom”. Scroll for pages. What sort of woman do you see most frequently depicted?
Now search for “disabled mom.” Scroll for pages. Do they look exhausted or happy?
Search for “disabled mom exhausted”. Can you find any exhausted disabled moms?
Now search for “queer mom exhausted.” What do you find? They all look pretty happy, right?
Search for “Black mom exhausted” and “white mom exhausted”. Who looks more bleak, unkempt, and sincerely spent?
I think none of the mothers look as worn down and unkempt as the slender white moms. Why?
Because this is the demographic of women most humanized in our dominant culture. They are allowed to be fully human, depicting a wide array of human experiences and emotions that will never come back to reflect on their entire race. They will be seen as individuals in stock photos, individuals telling a story about their experiences, not figureheads telling a story about what it means to be white, slender, or straight.
When disabled mothers are unhappy in photographs, the story that our dominant culture will interpret is that they’re unhappy because they’re disabled. Their identities as mothers will be recognized secondarily.
If queer mothers look unhappy in a photograph, the story that could be interpreted by someone wanting to weaponize the image is that they’d be happier if they didn’t have confused gender roles when parenting.
I suspect that stock photography sites feel pressure to show images that contradict our dominant social narratives so that they can’t be weaponized to feed bigotry.
We’ll know that we’ve established more social equality when all kinds of people find representation in media for all kinds of emotions and life experiences.
What if you don’t feel permitted to portray exhaustion?
You might be thinking about how pressured you feel to “have it all together” even though you’re a member of this white, able-bodied, straight, affluent, slender demographic. You might be pushing back on what I’m saying because you feel judged all the time. You don’t feel like you can show up at school pick-up looking like a raggamuffin.
That’s because you are judged all the time. All women are, all mothers are. The Mom Gaze is real.
But there’s a difference between how we feel and are talked about in our micro-cultures of family, community, religion or club and how we are talked about in the dominant culture of media and politics.
Think of how awful it feels to be scrutinized and judged in your daily life and imagine how much worse it would feel if you looked like someone who was constantly stereotyped in media and politics as [insert negative character traits].
The further away you are from being a member of the dominant social class, the more judged you are by total strangers, and not just by acquaintances and friends.
What you can do with this information
A lot of women don’t understand what oppression is and how it works until they become mothers. Either they haven’t experienced oppression or it was invisible to them because it was all they ever knew—like sexism.
After becoming mothers, our dehumanization happens so swiftly it’s nearly impossible for it to not register with us in some way. We may not name it correctly, we may internalize it as something we’re doing wrong, but we register that we’ve changed in the eyes of our culture.
We become “othered.” We become property to the culture at large even more than we were as women.
If we lean into our feelings, letting them rise to the surface (rather than bypassing them or backgrounding them), we will notice more ways mothers are blamed and scapegoated, exploited for free labour, and forced into multitudes of double-binds.
As this lived experience and analysis wakes us up to our state, we can let it act as a window to understand the ways racialized people are oppressed, disabled people are oppressed, trans and queer people are oppressed, fat people are oppressed, poor people are oppressed, and so on.
If motherhood is your first introduction to oppression, let it start a revolution in your heart where inequalities everywhere become more visible to you. Take your experience of oppression and layer more avenues and forms of oppression on top of it and imagine living that life.
All of us who experience some form of marginalization, social disadvantage, cultural scapegoating, or bigotry are tied to each other, bound by the same ideologies that value power, violence, and inequality.
Our liberation is tied up with each other’s.
If you want to understand your motherhood experience in a way that will blow your mind and transform the rest of our journey, I’ve spent the past two years creating a liberating course for mothers like you won’t find anywhere. Aside from raising my four kids, this course is the best thing I’ve done with my life.
If I had a course like this 15, 20 years ago? It would have changed my entire life and the life of my kids. I would have made dramatically different decisions, saving us all from trauma. I would have communicated differently. I would have loved myself better. I just— I can’t overstate how a course like this would have changed my life and my relationships.
