Is Motherhood Hard Work?
On work and care and privilege and Nightbitch
Is going to work “harder” than at home care work?
I’ve had several readers try and make this argument in response to my essay on Fair Play. That after a long day at work, the earning spouse needs a break. It is exhausting going to work, and they shouldn’t have to immediately start doing all the things at home. That their paid work is cognitively demanding and they need much more down time after working their 9-6 than they do spending a day with their kids.
I asked one commenter who made this argument if she had ever stayed at home, day in, day out, with young children. Not just for maternity leave but as a constant condition of her life. She said no and that it was a privilege she wished she’d had (more on that phrase later).
I recognize not all “work” is created equal, in other words, working all day at an Amazon warehouse is a different kind of tiring than being a therapist which is a different kind of tiring from billing clients all day or spending a day in court. Yes, some work is harder than others. But what I don’t care for is the presumption that someone else’s work is easier than another’s, especially if you’ve never performed said job. And as I mentioned to this commenter, parenting day in, day out, with no other adult in site, for days on end, is a different kind of tiring then parenting on the weekend when you know you’ll get a “break” once the work week resumes. (And yes, I am arguing that leaving the house and the children to others does constitute a break at least in that particular job).
The problem is that many people do not equate care work with work. Because we are performing labor (and yes, it is labor) for our family, people think it should not be tiring but fulfilling, peaceful, satisfying. Sunshine and rainbows.
Anyone who has spent more than two hours with a toddler knows this is anything but the case.
I wrote about how difficult I found the early days of motherhood in this post.
Until the pandemic forced my hand, I always worked in addition to mothering. After my first daughter was born, I went back to work full time as an editor at a publishing house before quitting due to my three hour round trip commute (this was in the days before working from home). Then I transitioned to “part-time” work. I say I worked “part-time” but that wasn’t really true. I took on a full-time workload, made a full-time salary, but only had part-time child care. And because I worked “part-time,” this meant, in addition, I was the default parent and took on 80% of childcare and household management. So during this time, I had what amounted to two full-time jobs.
And time at home with children is not easy. Yes, I know that people are now complaining that there is too much “motherhood is hard” content, and not enough evoking the joy of motherhood. But we don’t necessarily post this content to complain. We post this content because we don’t want other mothers, who are also pulling out their hair, to feel so alone. To feel shame about their inability to “savor every moment.”
It is important for mothers to feel seen when they feel like motherhood is impossible. Because in its current state in America, it is.
I was just beginning to name how unhappy I was during the early days of motherhood when the pandemic hit and the novel Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder was published. In fact, I have a chapter of my manuscript titled Rebel. It’s about when I started to strain against the tethers my roles required of me. When I started to feel my discontent and that all my years of self-sacrifice were perhaps not for the best.
During the pandemic, all mothers were tapping into their inner (and sometimes outer) primal screams. Without the pandemic, I may not have been radicalized as a mother and a feminist. Because my youngest would have gone to kindergarten and I would have enjoyed having my daytime hours back again to dedicate to my career. But instead, my kids boomeranged right back into my constant care just like when they were toddlers (luckily they didn’t throw quite as many tantrums though my youngest definitely would after a day spent on Zoom kindergarten).
I first wrote about Nightbitch in this 2022 post about my favorite books on motherhood. It is a book I’ve become an evangelist for (it is referenced in nine additional posts on this Substack). It named in a way I hadn’t seen before how suffocating motherhood is, even as you want it to fulfill you. It illuminated the inanity of the repetition of your days, the ways you can feel like a ghost in your own life, barely even there, even as your children require your constant presence.
Nightbitch has just been released as a feature film starring Amy Adams and I went to go see it opening night with my friend, author of Mom Rage, Minna Dubin. And while I was grateful to see motherhood depicted on the big screen, I wanted even more of the wildness of the book. The movie veered from the book in ways that kept it sanitized, contained, rather than setting the women sitting in the theatre running wild in the streets. I wanted an uproar. I wanted a revolution. Instead, the movie ends with Amy Adams giving birth, having a second child, signing up for another go at annihilation.
One of the themes I loved most in the book that was missing in the movie was exactly how the narrator ended up as a stay-at-home mother. I don’t think many women these days intend to stay home. It gets forced upon them by the impossible conditions of our society that lauds family values but leaves families completely unsupported. As women delay marriage and motherhood, we have lived entire lives, built successful careers, before becoming mothers, identities that are often hard to give up. The movie skipped over what the narrator faced as she tried to go back to work after becoming a mother, but it all became too hard. The pumping in closets, the being pulled in all directions, the society that looks at you like why did you have this baby if you weren’t going to be around for its childhood?
The narrator is also an artist, a career that many people consider frivolous, really no more than a hobby. So she quits but then seethes at what this form of motherhood requires of her, which is part lobotomy, part endless parade of patience. But how could she admit her displeasure? “She understood that she was just a privileged, overeducated lady in the middle of America living the dream of holding her baby twenty-four hours a day. According to basically everyone’s standards, she had nothing to complain about.”
This has been some of the discourse around my essay on Fair Play, the word privileged being used or implied, even though I was quite clear that quitting was forced upon me by the pandemic. A writer friend confided in me about the essay she’s been working on about having her career take a back seat during the pandemic while her husband’s was taking off, and her editor keeps wanting her to insert somewhere the fact that it was a privilege she could even do this.
I think perhaps back in the day, it was considered a “privilege” to have a parent stay home. It signaled the other parent made enough to support the entire family. It was a sign of wealth, status even. But I don’t think that staying home these days is a privilege anymore, especially given our divorce rates. Staying home is a sacrifice. To your earnings, your savings, your career goals, your ambition, and oftentimes your sanity.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
One of the themes of Nightbitch is how the narrator envies her husband and his ability to work:
“That night, as she waited in bed beside the boy, her husband lounged in a hotel room somewhere, reading a book or watching TV or playing video games, eating from a room-service tray laid out on the bed. Even if he was working on spreadsheets or filling out service reports on his laptop, the image of him there, by himself, in a quiet space, seemed luxurious and exotic. In her darkest moments, she imagined that her husband craved this time away from them, a wave of relief washing over him each Monday as he pulled out of the drive. Four whole uninterrupted nights of sleep! Blackout curtains! A discrete, achievable task to accomplish that day! A paycheck to expect at the end of the week!”
This is what Nightbitch depicts so well, the narrator’s frustration at her state in life which comes to feel like a prison. You see the endless meals being prepared, the walks to the library, the constant night-nights that take hours, the husband gone for work, the wife stuck managing everything. She starts to go crazy. She starts to go feral. Growing fur, canines, a tail. At night, she lets her animal nature take over, running the streets, digging in the garden, yes, even killing the family cat.
“She likes the idea of being a dog, because she can bark and snarl and not have to justify it. She can run free if she wants. She can be a body and instinct and urge. She can be hunger and rage, thirst and fear, nothing more. She can revert to a pure, throbbing state.”
Why does she go wild? Why does she turn into a dog? Because she is losing her mind being just mommy, and so there is a part of her within that rebels against her sanitized motherhood, who wants her to get back to the self she’s lost along the way, so the animal part of her rises and reminds her that within her, she holds multitudes.
People belittle art all the time. In the comments in my Fair Play post, people argue writing is a hobby, not a job, how could you take building a writing career seriously? But when I read this book, I felt seen. I understood myself in a way I hadn’t before. Nightbitch opened something in me, unlocked a door I didn’t even know was there, and then I could tiptoe through it. Nightbitch led me down the path to freeing myself, to my current state, divorced, out of my family home, with 50/50 custody, writing this Substack and my own book.
For within Nightbitch is not just the depiction of what the day to day drudgery of motherhood takes from you but also a recognition of its power. A reframe of how the ability to bring life into this world is so awe inspiring that it makes women question what else they are capable of. It ignites in them a desire to tap into their creative power, that can do more than just create babies, but entire worlds, books, revolutions.
“It’s almost as if having a child does not sate a deep yearning, but instead compounds it.
Look, the mother says, look at what I am capable of. I make life. I am life.”
Despite our complaints, it is not that we don’t want to be mothers, it is that we don’t want to care for our children alone. We want support from our partners, from society, from our employers. We want to feel like we’re all in this together, and not the only ones holding everything afloat. I love mothering and my relationship with my daughters brings me more joy and laughter than I can even name. I don’t regret being a mother at all. I regret staying in conditions that were not serving me for as long as I did. I regret that there was not a way for me to be a mother and myself in those early days when it literally all fell on my plate. When I, like Nightbitch, was internally disintegrating.
In the movie (Spoiler Alert!), the narrator separates from her husband because of her frustration with her state in life and it is this separation that allows her the time and space to create the art that she is so desperate to return to. When this happened in the movie, I turned to Minna. We didn’t remember this story line. As a woman who pursued her own divorce in the wake of unequal labor in the home, I felt like I would have remembered this! And when I returned home and glanced through the pages of my dogeared copy, I saw that this was a plot line developed for the movie. They separate, the father has to step up in his fathering due to co-parenting, and the narrator gets days to dedicate to her work. Then upon her successful art exhibition, he sees how much motherhood held her back, sees her yet again as artist, and they reconcile. And then, cut scene to her having another baby.
This, in my opinion, lacks the messiness and complexity of the book. In the book, the narrator makes space for her art by demanding more from her husband.
“She was exhausted by the time her husband arrived home at 6:00 p.m. and she handed the boy to him and said, I’m done. You’re doing night-nights every weekend night from now on. Thank you.
Her husband tipped his head quizzically and tickled the boy beneath the chin to make him laugh.
Sure, he said. Seems fair…
Why, she had only ever had to ask! It was so easy. She grew irate, not exactly with her husband but definitely generally with him. If it was this easy to get him to do things, then why had he not been doing them from the start? He should have offered. Moreover, why had she not been demanding more? Why had she not claimed the power and authority that were hers? Where had she learned to push it all down to the pit of her stomach, all her sadness and rage and annoyance, to fill up the space above with white wine, to carry on to the best of her ability and pretend toward contentment when all the while she could have been saying things, saying Fuck this! And Could you please? And I need.”
And one night, he comes out and sees her being Nightbitch, rolling around in the dirt and the grass.
“He was seeing what she was. Well, this was it, then, wasn’t it? Might as well get it over with. She had once been a girl, then a woman, a bride, expectant, a mother, and now she would be this, whatever this was. A wild, complicated woman with strange yearnings.”
Then it is clear that he sees her. He sees her and accepts her. He says the three most important words. “I get it.”
That is how their marriage survives. Because he gets it. He gets her need to tap into resources within her that are wild and beautiful and need to be out in the world. He gets that motherhood squashed all that, thus it squashed her and thus she disappeared in her marriage. He gets that if he wants to have his wife back, he must make room for her to access herself.
These are complicated negotiations and we don’t learn all the ins and outs. Does he stop traveling so much for work? Do they hire a nanny? Does her art ever bring in money, and if not, is it still worthwhile to him?
But in the novel, she certainly doesn’t have another baby, and I can’t see the narrator wanting to. Because she doesn’t want to go back. She doesn’t want to give up her newfound freedom. She doesn’t want to lose herself again.
If you enjoyed this post, please become a subscriber! And did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers? If you are reading this as an email, there is a heart button at the top and bottom of this email. Click on it and it will take you to the Substack website where you can also leave a comment if you are a paying subscriber. Sharing it as a Note also helps. Thanks so much for reading and engaging with my writing. Its means so much.
OTHER BOOKS I’M AN EVANGELIST FOR:
Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (*featured in Maternal Finitude)
All Fours by
(*featured in In Praise of Becoming Unhinged)Liars by Sarah Manguso (*featured in Is This the End of Marriage?)
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by
(*featured in Plot Twists)ICYMI
I was worried about how they sanitized the movie after seeing the first trailer months ago. Amy Adams is great but way too mom next door for the novel’s protagonist. Honestly hearing they end with a second baby instead of a wild Art event makes me unsure I’ll have see the film. The book is epic because it is raw, honest and wild. You can’t sanitize that and expect it to be at all the same.