Allison Carr Mutha - Magazine ((full))

My daughter is two years old, which means she has recently discovered the power of the emphatic “No.” But more importantly, she has discovered my camera roll. The other day, while waiting for her oatmeal to cool, she grabbed my phone. I braced for the inevitable butt-dial to my editor or a rogue FaceTime to my ex-husband. Instead, she went quiet. She was scrolling through photos of herself.

I think about that photo my daughter found. The “sad” one. In it, I am not performing. I am not trying to be a “good mom” for the ‘gram. I am just being a mom. My hand is dirty. The light is fluorescent. The moment is ugly. And yet, that is the photo she was drawn to. Not the Easter portrait. Not the beach sunset. The Tuesday morning apocalypse. allison carr mutha magazine

But she was right, and she wasn’t. She wasn’t sad in that photo. She was furious. And I was exhausted. And the two feelings had occupied the same square inch of our kitchen floor. Mutha readers know this space. It’s the space where the pristine fantasy of motherhood—the one sold to us in the glossy magazines at the pediatrician’s office—goes to die. It is replaced by something rawer, funnier, and infinitely more true. My daughter is two years old, which means

Before I had my daughter, I thought motherhood was a filter. I thought you applied it to your life and suddenly everything was softer, warmer, saturated with purpose. I would watch other women push strollers and think they were living inside a lifestyle blog. I didn’t see the crusted Cheerio stuck to the jogger’s wheel. I didn’t see the dark circles under the sunglasses. Instead, she went quiet

This is what I want to tell the woman who is reading this in the bathtub while her partner wrangles the toddler, or the one hiding in the Target parking lot for ten extra minutes just to hear herself think. You are not failing because your kitchen is a disaster zone. You are not a bad mother because you did not make the sensory bin from Pinterest. You are not broken because you sometimes miss the silence.