admin Five days after I became a mother of twins, I held my daughter beside her NICU bed and sobbed openly. When a nurse approached me and asked what was wrong, I let it all spill out: I told her how I felt disconnected from everything. My body, my emotions, myself. My children.
Everyone told me that the day I met my babies would be the best day of my life, but I didn’t feel that joy or an instant, all-consuming connection — it was buried too deep beneath fear, birth trauma, extreme sleep deprivation, and, I now suspect, an undiagnosed case of postpartum depression. I felt like I was inhabiting someone else’s body, holding someone else’s child.
“Oh, no. You can’t do this to yourself,” the nurse told me. “Mom guilt is something you’re always going to experience, but you’ve got to let it go. It’s all in your head.”
But now, I see it so clearly: She got it wrong. We’ve all been getting it wrong when it comes to mom guilt. It’s not all in our heads. It’s not something we can just “let go” or “ditch” or “not buy into.” And if we want to address mom guilt, we have to trace it back to the place from which it originates.
American mothers live in a country that offers virtually no support and a society that upholds incredibly unrealistic standards for them. There’s the structural stuff: the lack of national paid parental leave, the inaccessibility of child care, the sad state of postpartum care. And then there’s the cultural stuff: The idea that moms should “have it all” and act accordingly, the mental load, the double standards, unrealistic media representations of parenthood, the glorification of mommy martyrdom and rampant online mom-shaming. In light of all that, mothers feeling as though they can’t measure up is inevitable.
“For every mom I know, guilt is their baseline,” says Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Moms First. “If you live in America, which has no structural support, every day is a new opportunity for you to feel like a failure. I think the way that we talk about mom guilt, it’s as if you should just snap your fingers and do it on your own. The reality is, it takes structural change and it takes cultural change.”
The structural issues—particularly lack of paid leave, inaccessibility of childcare, and unequal pay, according to Saujani—set mothers on a journey of guilt that begins as soon as they step into the role. There’s also the culture of toxic positivity surrounding motherhood, which leaves us wholly unprepared for the messy, exhausting realities. But instead of recognizing the role systemic and societal issues play, we blame mothers for imposing guilt on themselves—effectively guilting them for experiencing guilt.
