The Motherhood Debt: the hidden costs of becoming a mum
It’s late afternoon. My 16 month old son is wailing at me from the kitchen floor, overtired and hungry. The dog is trying to wedge himself between my legs as if that could turn the volume down. And me? I’m trying to calm the baby, shush the dog and make dinner after a long day, with PMS breathing down my neck.
And it’s at that moment that I throw the spatula down on the worktop and shout,
“I JUST CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
The explosion looked spontaneous, but in reality, it had been brewing for months. Being pulled in every possible direction: settling into a new job, raising a child, maintaining a relationship and friendships, trying to keep my coaching business afloat, watching my finances dwindle…I snapped. The weight of the mental load of motherhood had gotten too heavy. And I was not prepared for it.
Wasn’t this motherhood thing supposed to get easier? Everyone had said, just make it through the first year. But 16 months in, it felt like drowning. Weren’t babies meant to start sleeping after six months? Why was my relationship suffering? Why were my finances through the floor? What had happened to the laughing, smiley mum who’d wondered what all the fuss was about, socialising effortlessly with her baby settled nicely in his sling? What was wrong with me?
That moment, standing in my kitchen making pesto pasta for what felt like the hundredth time that month, was when I realised that I’d been trying to live my life as it had been before having my son. And that was always going to fail, because my life wasn’t the same. Becoming a mum had changed everything.
This is, of course, not unique to me. I’ve had so many conversations with other mums - curled up on sofas, standing in kitchens, walking with prams, on social media, at the playground - that revealed a stark truth. We were all struggling.
The journey of motherhood is so universal, as old as humanity. And yet somehow, we still found ourselves glassy-eyed, fragile and almost shell-shocked at just how hard it is. And, more importantly, how underprepared we were for it.
Somehow, the things we’d heard before birthing our children had changed. It had gone from “things get better once they start sleeping through the night” to “mine’s five years old and I still get up every night.” They became less, “just make it through the first year and you’ll find your way back to each other,” and more “it’s been years and we barely tolerate each other.” We were, in a word, blindsided.
Household income was irrelevant, as was where they lived, married or unmarried, native or immigrant, supported by family or not - no amount of privilege was an insurance policy. Nobody came through unscathed. And just when it seemed like you were starting to make sense of your new world, a new developmental phase would come around and bam, new challenge unlocked. Breastfeeding, weaning, babyproofing the house, childcare admin, finances, returning to work…as soon as you dealt with one, another would pop up, like a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole.
I started to realise that this wasn’t just a consequence of having children. It wasn’t a series of isolated struggles. It’s a consequence of having a child and being a woman in the modern world. Because while a dad might also be affected by sleepless nights or the change in relationship dynamics, it’s the mum who goes through the biggest transformation. From pregnancy right through postpartum and beyond, the process of Matrescence - becoming a mother - is so total that no part of her life survives intact as it was before.
The emotional, physical, practical, relational, logistical and financial changes all add up to create a load that builds over time, creating a kind of debt due to the lack of support needed to carry it.
The Motherhood Debt is the hidden cost of modern motherhood.
Not because motherhood itself is the problem, but because of the way it’s structured and supported today. Even when it’s done willingly and often more than once, The Motherhood Debt affects us all across one or more areas of our lives. Not all at once, not always in the same way, but consistently, over time:
Identity Debt: our sense of self, our place in the world and even our brains change with pregnancy and motherhood
Relationship Debt: sexuality, sensuality, romance, intimacy and friendships change and come under pressure with motherhood
Financial Debt: taking time out of work to raise children and often returning part time translates to less household income, and reduced future income due to reduced pension and investment contributions
Career Debt: whether returning to work full or part time, mums are often the default for taking time off when the kids are sick, to cover school holidays, meaning less visibility or perceived eligibility for promotions
Village/Support Debt: support networks can become diluted - finding less in common with friends without kids, social time getting harder once babies become toddlers, moving to new areas to find affordable housing or navigating tentative connections with other new mums all add up to feeling less supported
Time and energy Debt: balancing the mental load of family admin and developmental milestones with maintaining self-care, health and wellbeing can feel difficult when squeezed into portions of child-free time, or on little sleep
These things are not all necessarily new, and they’re a very common experience. So how come we’re so unprepared for this?
Becoming a mum – that process of Matrescence - is a big transition. Alongside birth and death, it’s one of the biggest we can go through, altering even our brain chemistry. And yet, we have almost no preparation for it. The word Matrescence isn’t even in the dictionary, despite it being coined back in 1973 by anthropologist Dana Raphael.
When you consider how wide and deep those debts are felt by mums, friends gathering around with frosted cakes and balloons seems severely insufficient. Fun, sure. Emotional? Absolutely. But a baby shower alone does not and cannot help a woman start to fathom what it means to become a mum.
We prepare for other transitions in our lives with time, energy and often money. We celebrate entering Adulthood with religious ceremonies and parties, and choosing a life partner with marriage. Pregnancy comes with preparation, albeit mostly centering around the birth and perhaps the first few days with your new baby. What we don’t prepare ourselves for, is what comes after.
Raising children is one of the biggest jobs in the world, literally shaping the next generation of humanity. How we do it has massive implications on everything from future communities, politics and even the health of the planet. And yet we are all just muddling through it, while also trying to make sense of the hormonal soup and shifting landscape our lives have become.
Mothering babies and children is challenging. But it’s modern motherhood in our culture that actually makes it feel so hard. When the outside world expects us to carry on as before, to continue absorbing these debts infinitely, when we don’t hear people sharing honestly and instead look at social media perfection, we start to make meaning of it all. Too often, that meaning sounds like: I’m the problem. I’m a failure. Why am I the only one struggling? But you’re not.
If it feels hard, that’s because it is.
It’s hard to have an entire paycheck swallowed by the childcare you need to keep a roof over your head. It’s hard to have less community resources and social tolerance for the noise and mess children inevitably bring with them. It’s hard to feel adrift from your partner. It’s hard to find a moment to catch your breath in a world that never sleeps.
If older generations tell you it was so much easier in their day, that’s because to some extent it was. Our modern, Western world isn’t structurally set up with families in mind as it once was. Many of us grew up with a sense of family that felt more supported. More people around, more shared responsibility, more time spent outdoors with friends instead of constantly with caregivers. Even when that wasn’t personally the case, this kind of childhood was beamed to us in TV shows and films. It would be impossible for that not to shape our expectations on what our own families might look and feel like when we started having them.
Modern motherhood asks something different from us, and therefore needs different support to plug the debts it creates. By naming and speaking to these debts and speaking from the heart, we can start to feel seen and heard. We realise that the debts of motherhood are real, not imagined and can be addressed.
And in the same way that we might start reducing financial debt by asking: what is your income, and what are your outgoings? We can start to help mums navigate matrescence and the debts of motherhood by asking:
Why do we expect mothers to carry so much on their own?
Welcome to The Mama Circle Podcast!
Sharing the emotional, relational and financial realities of modern motherhood, aka, The Motherhood Debt.
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