In the self-checkout, my 3-year-old son Joey insists on helping me scan our groceries. He moves in slow motion, his tiny hands fumbling with the bag of clementines, the fruit snacks, the milk. The line behind us is growing. I can feel the weight of impatient eyes, hear the exaggerated sighs.
“We have to hurry up, Joey. People are waiting,” I say, reaching for the next box he’s trying to grab.
“I can do it by myself,” he screams.
I check my frustration, taking deep breaths with a clenched jaw as we make our way through the last few items. When we finish, an older man walking past smiles at us and says, “I miss that age. All mine are grown. Enjoy every minute — goes by too fast.”
I smile, but in that moment, the last thing I feel is enjoyment. Instead, I feel like I’m failing. Like I’m missing something that other parents seem to have — some endless supply of patience, some innate sense of ease, some certainty that they were born for this role. And that I wasn’t. At least, that’s how it feels.
But not every moment is like this. There are plenty that fill me with joy, moments that remind me why this love is so deep, so all-consuming. Like when Joey grabs my face with both hands, presses his nose to mine, and whispers, “I love you, Mommy.” Or when he climbs on top of our dog, Sundae, giggling as he asks me to take a photo. When he belts out “I’m Still Standing” from “Sing,” his tiny pointer fingers stabbing the air to the beat, completely lost in the music.
And my favorite — when he asks me to rock him to sleep. We listen to the playlist I started when I was pregnant, and he fades away to the same sounds he’s heard since before he was born. These are the moments I wish I could freeze. These are the moments I feel I’m right where I belong.
One night, after a particularly rough bedtime battle, I found myself at my desk, my face buried in my hands as I choked back tears. My fingers traveled under my hair and I yanked hard, as if trying to scalp myself — peeling away a version I’m ashamed of, a version I can’t stand. I was reliving 10 minutes ago — me snapping at my restless little boy, raising my voice, frustrated he wasn’t lying down as I asked. I saw his face change, his lip moving into a pout. I heard his fragile voice tell me, “You’re making me sad.”
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His words echoed in my mind, and the feeling I got inside my body was how I imagine it must feel to wake up during surgery because your anaesthesia ran out. I could feel them slicing through me — going deeper and deeper and deeper.
I was destroyed. Crippled with shame of my actions, hating myself for the hurt I caused him. And I thought: Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mother. What kind of mother yells at her kid for not wanting to sleep? He deserves so much better than me.
The guilt was suffocating. I should go back in, I told myself. I should apologise, kiss his forehead, whisper in his ear that I love him so much. But I didn’t move. Because I didn’t feel like I deserved to. Like I didn’t deserve his forgiveness. Like I didn’t deserve him. Because in that moment, I felt like the worst mother in the world. So I sat there, stuck in my own self-hatred, convinced that I was failing at the most important thing I will ever do.
In therapy, I confessed this to my counsellor, Meaghan Grabowski, who at this point feels like the only person I can be brutally honest with about these types of feelings. When I interviewed her for this story, she shared some advice.
“How is it possible to enjoy every moment of anything, let alone something so challenging and complex as parenting?” she asked. “That being said, the fact that you feel guilt about it is extremely normal.”
Grabowski says difficult emotions do not equal bad emotions. “Do we say the same thing about our careers? About school? About marriage? Every experience comes with challenges, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to deny the reality of those challenges.”
And yet, mothers are held to a different standard. “It’s supposed to be the most important, most amazing, most fulfilling thing that you do,” Grabowski said. “We don’t give that same messaging to fathers. Mothers are somehow supposed to make everything about their children and also not make everything about their children, which is an impossible contradiction.”
That contradiction breeds shame. When someone tells me to “enjoy every moment,” what I hear is: If you don’t, you’re ungrateful. If you’re frustrated, if you’re struggling, if you’re counting the minutes until bedtime, you’re a horrible human being.
Grabowski says self-esteem issues and perfectionism play into this, too. “If you are a perfectionist, you’re going to struggle with anything that feels like criticism. Whether it’s meant to be a criticism or not, an unprompted piece of advice telling you how you should feel about a moment with your child — or even just about being a mother in general — is going to feel like a criticism and a comparison that you’re not measuring up.”
And that’s exactly how I feel — like I’m never measuring up. Like no matter how much I love my son, I will never be a “good mother.”
The pressure to feel a certain way about motherhood isn’t unique to me, of course. Amy Klein, author of ”The Trying Game,” has been there, too. After enduring four miscarriages and years of infertility treatments, she felt added pressure to be thankful for every second of motherhood. “For the first six months to a year, I felt like I couldn’t complain,” she told me. “I felt like I had to be grateful all the time.”
As mothers, we often say, I should feel this or I shouldn’t feel that. “I try to tell people, you should just feel what you feel,” Klein said. Her wish is that every mom and mom-to-be will allow themselves the full range of feelings — even the difficult ones.
Melissa Petro, author of ”Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification” has written extensively about how shame is weaponised against mothers. “Our whole economy really relies on mothers doing all of this work without complaint,” Petro said. “If we internalise our struggle rather than externalising it, then we’re more likely to just try harder than to fight back against the forces that are just so utterly out of our control.”
For parents drowning in guilt, Petro recommends finding someone you can be totally honest with. “Finding that just-right friend — that person who can listen and reflect back the truth of your experience — is just so powerful and important, especially when we’re struggling. And especially when we’re struggling through something that’s so mystified and misunderstood as mothering,” she said. “Finding people who really reflect the truth of your experience — those are the people that are going to embolden you and empower you.”
Lauren Finney Harden understands this struggle, too. She dealt with postpartum anxiety, and when people told her to “enjoy every moment,” it only made her feel worse. She told me, “I was trying to apply all these efficiency things — all the things that had made me so successful at work — trying to apply it to this baby, which obviously doesn’t work. And it would just send me into a tailspin.”
Now a mother of two, Finney Harden has made it her mission to provide a more realistic voice in motherhood, using her social media to tell struggling parents, “If you actually think this is terrible and you can’t stand when people say ‘enjoy every moment,’ come talk to me. Because I will give you the real, unvarnished truth about how hard it is. But I’ll remind you that it’s temporary and that you will get through it.”
Motherhood isn’t just hard — it’s absolutely brutal. It can be beautiful, of course. But it can also be lonely, boring and infuriating. And it’s OK to feel that — because it’s real. And maybe if we were all a little more real, we’d stop feeling so bad.
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