‘I Didn’t Sign Up For This’

Navigating the highs and lows of motherhood, many mums find themselves thinking, “I didn’t sign up for this.”

“I didn’t sign up for this,” I often catch myself thinking. Usually when I’m running on my 1750th night of broken sleep, trying to stop sibling squabbles, reply to an email, and figure out how to put the crusts back onto a piece of toast (even though I was explicitly told – no crusts).

Yes, I wanted to be a mum. In fact I tried really hard to become one. But navigating the minefield of big emotions, anxieties, and let’s not even talk about hormones? Nobody warned me about that part.

Now, our mothers and grandmothers surely had their challenges, but they often had a strong community behind them – the so-called village we all hear so much about. Whereas mamas of this generation – many of us are isolated, we are expected to seamlessly transition from professional life to mum life (and back again) like it’s no big deal, we’re keeping house and keeping up appearances, while also wondering what happened to our social lives.

Not to mention the pressure to excel at everything … even though we’re told there’s no such thing as perfect, that societal expectation is still there, you know?

Written for Mama Disrupt® | Read the full feature here.