“You’re supposed to love being a mother but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time.” America Ferrera
The mixed messages we receive in motherhood are rampant:
- You’re supposed to give it all but look like you’ve got it all together.
- You’re supposed to work like you don’t have kids and mother like you don’t work.
- Savor every moment but for goodness’ sake be more interesting than just a mom.
Sure, we can try to temporarily numb the sting of these impossible dualities by making memes about them, laughing at the absurdity of it all, or complaining about them to each other. But those options don’t offer a promise of real change or relief. The hard and sad reality we need to acknowledge is that we often exist in a space where we have to negotiate and navigate competing and conflicting messages about what it means to be a mother. And we’re doing it on our own while trying to sort through the mess of it all. The hidden cost of this is that it drains our energy and leaves us bewildered, exhausted and feeling like we’re falling short no matter what we do.
Who would have thought that some helpful insights about motherhood would be found in the Barbie movie? Who would have guessed that film based on the female doll known for being the prototype of absolutely unachievable perfection would actually add some serious depth and wisdom to the conversation around how moms today can experience motherhood differently.
I think there are four lessons for moms that the Barbie movie can shed light on:
America Ferrerra said, “Okay, what about ordinary Barbie? She’s not extraordinary. She’s just a mom wearing a flattering top and she wants to get through the day feeling kind of good about herself.” This line didn’t get as much play as her epic monologue but maybe this should be the new standard for moms everywhere, normalizing the totally okay status of ordinary.
A recent Baby Center study found that 83 percent of moms said it was important to them to be the perfect mother. It sounds nuts at face-value but study after study supports the idea that mothers are holding themselves to impossible standards. If you couple this with a constant barrage of social media content that makes it seem like nearly every mom is somehow side-hustling her way to a six-figure income while juggling five kids and having a six-pack, it’s enough to make your head spin.
For some reason, we’ve normalized the pursuit of extraordinary. We’ve put forward the message that moms should be able to do it all, be it all, and yet not feel the intense weight of it all.
Let’s shift this narrative and take a cue from the Barbie movie and start to populate the message that being ordinary is actually quite amazing. When ordinary is good enough the pressure to keep doing more and adding more on your plate evaporates. When ordinary is enough you can feel content where you are, and it opens up your ability to take in the moment, soak up what’s in front of you, and allow you the headspace to tap into rest and joy in motherhood.
“Being a human can be pretty uncomfortable,” said Barbie. As Barbie started to recognize the realities of life beyond Barbieland, she began to acknowledge that life outside those pretty pink borders was actually quite painful at times. This realization is one many women are faced with as they become mothers. As women, we are told that motherhood is magical, that it is the most fulfilling part of life, or that it will complete some part of us that we didn’t know was missing. And then we enter into the motherland and are completely baffled when that isn’t our experience. What if it’s not feeling really magical right now as you’re sitting there weary and covered in spit up? What if you feel lost without your career instead of self-actualized as a mom? These one-sided messages can leave all of us feeling like we’re somehow lacking something other moms have or that we’re malfunctioning all together.
When you become a mom, you’re often told to “enjoy every moment” or “remember you just have eighteen summers,” which somehow is supposed to make those hard moments more manageable. But it doesn’t help. Let’s stop sugar coating it. Sometimes being a human is uncomfortable. Sometimes being a mom is hard. But even when it’s hard and uncomfortable, it can be amazing and beautiful and a privilege. Let’s stop trying to ignore the hard while glorifying the good—they can exist together, so let’s allow ourselves space for both. For the messy and the magic. When we do this, we will stop feeling so darn bad about ourselves when we’re not enjoying every moment.
We live in the information overload era of motherhood. At any given moment you can hop on Instagram and scroll hundreds of parenting “experts” opinions. While this is a valuable tool that our parents didn’t have at their literal fingertips, sometimes too much of a good thing can become bad. This information overload—which can often offer contradicting advice—can send us moms on a never-ending quest for the “right” way to do parenting and motherhood.
And when we add the picture-perfect examples of motherhood we can easily find online with that contradicting advice, it’s hard to know if our personal version of motherhood is really cutting it. We all have an internalized version of what it means to be a “good” mom. We learn how to be mothers from the moment we were born based on how our caregivers raised us and then we have kids and these internalized experiences shape the expectations we hold ourselves to. Oftentimes we don’t even examine these expectations and think about whether they will work for us. We simply accept them and start to feel bad when we fall short of them.
I want to put forth a new idea inspired by Barbie. Just like she refused to get back inside her box and be constrained by those walls, what if we just allowed ourselves to mother outside the box. Let’s not get caught up in the comparison but instead give ourselves the freedom to figure out what works best for us and our families.
This is the radically freeing part of being an adult: we get to choose how we define our lives. We get to choose what we repeat from our past, what we revise, and what else we want to incorporate. There’s no one right way for everyone.
In the final scenes of Barbie, America Ferrara’s character, Gloria, used her powerful and moving words to awaken the Barbies out of their patriarchal trance. She literally spoke life into them. As mothers, we have the ability to the same thing. As we share our truths with other moms—the hard, the beautiful, and the unfiltered moments of motherhood—we have the power to transform ourselves and the mother in front of us and our culture at large. With every whisper of “I’ve been there too” or “I feel that way too” we make movement toward finding a new path in motherhood. A path with a whole lot less pressure to be perfect, experience judgment from others or ourselves, and one where we have the room to define what it means to be mom enough.
So the next time you’re feeling the inner angst to sign your kids up for one more extracurricular, volunteer for one more school carnival shift that you don’t have time for, or nitpick all the ways you’re not measuring up to your picture perfect version of what you thought you’d be like as a mother I want you to remember these four points and in the words of Weird Barbie, “the choice is now yours.” You get to choose how you see yourself and offer compassion over judgment. You get to choose how you interpret those hard moments. You get to choose how you shape your own experience in motherhood and you get to choose how you lift up and breathe life into other moms. The choice is yours.
If you’re ready to experience motherhood in a new way, you can grab Dr. Morgan’s book, Love Your Kids Without Losing Yourself: 5 Steps to Banish Guilt and Beat Burnout When You Already Have Too Much to Do, here.
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