Your child shouldn't be your entire existence.

Freeing yourself and your child from expectations.

Before I had my son, I was determined not to be a victim of motherhood. I didn’t want to wear jeans with the navy elastic waistband or maternity clothes at all. It felt awkward to announce I was with child on Instagram, but I feared that if I didn’t, I wasn’t excited enough. I hated the slow pace of pregnancy pilates, and my brain went numb with all the baby talk that took over the class. I wasn’t interested in the mum lob, a haircut that almost everyone I knew at the time did to symbolise they would be part of the mumhood sometime soon. I refused to have a baby shower – something my best friend told me I would regret (I haven’t yet). I didn’t want gifts, fuss, or to move the needle too far from myself or my comfort zone just because soon I was going to be somebody’s mother. I leant out of most of the traditions. I didn’t read the books or ask for advice. I wanted to do it my way and felt very strongly about rejecting the ideals of others. Needless to say, I did not remain this way.

I spent the first three years of my son’s life petrified of fucking him up. I took my role as a mother very seriously. More serious than I think I’ve taken any job in my entire life. The stakes felt high. Impossibility high. And I didn’t want to be the one he blamed when unpacking his childhood to a stranger with a Smithsonian notebook and an Eames chair (yes, apparently, in my dreams, his therapist is as stylish as they are intelligent) or probably a more accurate description; I didn’t want to become the topic of conversation with a fellow drunken stranger in the bathroom at a nightclub.

The immense pressure of ensuring the stability of my son’s physical health and emotional well-being and feeling responsible, on a local and global level, for him to be a decent human, equal partner and ally in an increasingly cruel and divisive world felt asphyxiating. He was already born with so much privilege (white, middle class, neurotypical, able-bodied etc.), I felt like I had to get this right, get it all right, and if I didn’t, I had failed not only as a mother but also humankind. I know I am not alone in this feeling. Especially when Covid hit, and our parenting choices were amplified and scrutinised. Gentle parenting was (and I think still is) all the rage. Strict guidelines that have you bending over backwards so as not to quash your child’s spirit by merely telling them to ‘hurry up’.

That perpetual fear of fucking up our kids made us easy to sell to. And with the lockdowns, this also meant we were a captive audience – whether we wanted to be is another story. There was no room for error in the gentle parenting world. To me, this marketable parenting strategy (yes, for $149.99USD you too can tame the toddler tantrums) feels like a re-packaged, more carefully worded version of the sacrificial mother who has been on a proverbial pedestal for… ever. Forgoing pleasure, career, self and soul – all in the name of being Mum. Which is just not true. This is not an attack on gentle parenting techniques; it is the intensity and the brevity in which others prey on parents and how social media continuously spits out regurgitated jargon, making it impossible to navigate new parenthood. Unless, of course, you totally disconnect from the Metaverse, which was all the community we had for most of 2020-2022 and has become increasingly tricky to shun now most of our careers and livelihood depends on staying connected.

I came to this realisation almost four years into my motherhood experience, and I can even laugh about how serious I was about my parenting choices. They are, after all, little blobs who eat, poop, smirk and scream for at least the first 12 months; even at two years, they don’t quite understand sentences like ‘mummy just needs a moment.’ I am now out of the murky canals of new parenthood, perhaps feeling both proud and nostalgic as my beautiful son turns four in less than a week. I have grown to understand that the greatest gift we can give our kids is relieving them of the pressure to be the reason for our entire existence. (Imagine trying to live up to the expectation of being someone’s motivation to live?)

I have loved every part of my son since I learnt of his existence, but I have not enjoyed every part of motherhood – and there have been times I would have buried this secret. Now I understand that being a worthy mother does not boil down to your enjoyment and gratitude for every milk-stained moment or resisting the urge to not shout, ‘Get in the carseat now!’ when it has taken a total of 17 minutes for said four year old to sit in position so I can buckle him up, or how much you sacrifice to make your child the centre of your universe. It comes down to the bond you share and the work you put into preserving it, no matter what. It’s not the amount of research you do or clocking up a certain amount of hours with them. But it is about making our kids feel good in our presence and not feeling responsible for making us feel good in return.

In all that breaks and bends and shape-shifts in becoming somebody’s mother, building a bond with my son that is free from expectation is what has liberated me from my own expectations of how I should be as a mother and a person. This leaves all the space we both need to be adored for simply being ourselves.