Why Should Moms Have to Justify Their Choices?

This piece on whether what moms want matters isn’t the one I intended to write. 

Initially, I sat down to defend working motherhood. To lay out the financial, familial, and personal benefits of having a career and kids at the same time. 

It’s the kind of post I would have loved to come across as a new mom who didn’t know how to balance my kids and my career. In the months after becoming a mom, I had bent every which way and twisted myself into knots trying to justify my desire to continue working.

But as I started to delve into the topic, I kept getting stuck. Because while I intended to write the answers I’d have wanted as a young mom, to do so I had to write around the actual question at hand:

Why do I, or any mom, have to justify our choices?

No, I don’t “just love” being a mom

When our daughter was three months old, we held a baby blessing for her — a sort of Mormon answer to a christening (I was still practicing at the time). My aunt came over to congratulate me and admire my three-month-old infant.

“Don’t you just love being a mom?” she asked, cooing at my daughter — she herself had 10 kids.

I stared blankly at her. I knew the right answer, what I was supposed to say but couldn’t choke out.

“No,” was the flat word that fell out of my mouth instead, along with a nervous laugh. “Who would love this? This is awful.”

“I love my daughter, but I don’t like being a mom. Everyone keeps telling me this is supposed to be so wonderful, amazing, and great, but this has been the hardest three months of my life.”

As a new mom, the guarantees that motherhood would bring me all the joy and fulfillment I would need were already ringing hollow. 

My feminine destiny: stay-at-home motherhood

Women are taught that the best thing we can possibly be is a good, virtuous wife and mother. The idealization of motherhood as the pinnacle of a woman’s life and achievements is extremely common in American society. 

But growing up Mormon, I’d received an even more concentrated, constant stream of this message. To use an analogy no good Mormon will understand, these societal ideals of moms are coffee compared to the espresso shot of the Mormon mythos of motherhood. 

From the time I was old enough to realize I was a girl, I was taught that motherhood was my purpose: “the greatest job that any mother will ever do will be in nurturing, teaching, lifting, encouraging and rearing her children in righteousness and truth.” 

According to God’s will, my job was to nurture my kids — while their father’s was to protect and provide. In other words, his career and vocation not only mattered, it was among his most important roles and responsibilities in our family. 

Putting mothers on pedestals, however, also means boxing them in with rules. I heard women urged, again and again, to stay at home to raise their kids rather than work. 

Putting kids in daycare was a poor choice, too, since “None other can adequately take her [a mother’s] place.” If mothers did have careers, they must always put their children and husbands first and, ideally, choose a job that was “family-friendly.” 

The message: Moms’ careers don’t matter

In short, I believed I was literally destined to be a mom, and specifically, a stay-at-home mom. These messages seeped into my bones and identity to the point that I barely noticed, let alone questioned them — yet.

When I weighed decisions like where I would go to college or what I would study, it all seemed inconsequential. Or at least secondary to the bigger choices that would come with my “real job” in life of being a mom, like who I would marry and when. 

Why pour years of study and tens of thousands of dollars into college or study for a career path I’d quit as soon as I popped out a baby? It only mattered in terms of whether it would help me be a good mother, or provide my family with a backup plan should my husband’s career somehow fail or fall short.

And what career would be compatible with motherhood? Only “family-friendly” jobs were suggested to me: teacher, nurse, or write. My male peers, meanwhile, were encouraged to pursue high-paying careers that would enable them to be the sole income earners in their families.

If mom’s career doesn’t matter, maybe mom doesn’t matter

I got the message loud and clear: My educational and professional choices didn’t matter. Not really. Not in the same way that my husband’s did.

His desire for a career was more important than mine — financially, parentally, socially. When I met anyone new at our church, they always asked me about my husband’s career before asking if I even worked at all.

But once I became a mother, I felt the weight of this belief. The implications were laid bare:

If I wanted a career, and yet my career didn’t matter — that meant I didn’t matter.

What I wanted for my own life and financial future was of little import compared to what was best, helpful, convenient to my kids and husband. Any beautiful, amazing things I felt were good for me could only be judged by how much they benefited my family.

Traveling was okay, sure — but only if it didn’t take me away from my babies too much. Working is not ideal but it’s fine, as long as I only work during hours in which my kids won’t want or need me. I could do things for myself, but only if I first do everything for everyone else. 

I and many moms have gotten the message loud and clear: that we must sacrifice and burn ourselves out to warm everyone around us. 

No one wants moms to be martyrs

I’ve long since settled on working motherhood and left the Mormon church behind, but I haven’t outgrown the socialization to self-sacrifice.

And I don’t think it’s just me, and it’s not always about working vs. staying at home. Many moms feel the opposite pressure of what I felt, to stick with a career even if they wanted to stay at home. But it’s just another side of the same message.

Whether we feel told to stay home, or to work, we’re rarely asked what we want. And that what moms want matters only if it aligns with what’s best for our families.

That our identities, failures, successes, and happiness has to be inextricably tied to our roles as parents.

But I’ll challenge you the same way I challenged myself by asking: who exactly wants that for you? Who wants you to be a martyr?

I think of what I’d hope for other parents I know, and for my own parents. I never wanted or needed them to make these kinds of sacrifices, to martyr themselves, to set aside their dreams to build my future. What a burden to put on me, the knowledge that I would have been the obstacle that kept my parents from living the lives they wanted.

And I look to my daughter, to what she is learning about what it means to be alive, to be human, to be a woman. If she chooses to have children one day, what kind of parenthood I’m modeling for her? How would I want motherhood to feel for her?

I don’t want her to feel compelled to list all the ways a course of action will benefit her kids before she can comfortably trust it. Or rework her budget to zero out any impact her choices might have on her family’s finances. Or to allow herself space to breathe, to live, to take up space only after satisfying everyone else first.

My daughter deserves the freedom to build for herself a life she feels good waking up into every day. And if she deserves that, I have to believe that I do, too. 

What moms want matters

I want her, me, and you to live in this truth: that the responsibilities we have to our selves cannot be superseded by our responsibilities to others. 

What moms want matters.

The pursuit of our own health and happiness needs no justification; it is inherently just.

There is no case to be made for what matters to me, what I want, and what’s important to me if I refuse to put it on trial or up for debate. When I fully own my life as for me, first and foremost.

The choices we make matter less than having full ownership over those decisions. Than being as committed to our own well-being and life as we are to others’. And choosing what we want, and trusting that we can make it right.

I’m not there — I’m still growing into it. Yet I choose to keep stepping into it, as I have the strength and courage.

Photos by Aswin and Derek Thomson on Unsplash