Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss how the silent isolation of modern motherhood is turning moms into addicts.
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I was reading a piece in The Atlantic about a mom who had entered motherhood during the height of the pandemic. She felt overwhelmed by the weight of the responsibilities and turned to weed to calm the stress.
“Taylor Mitchem’s baby was born in March 2020. By the time they both left the hospital, the world had shut down. Mitchem had no extended family nearby, no friends who could visit. Her husband was around, but because he was nervous about the newborn’s fragility, she felt responsible for most of the child care. Her postpartum days were endless and isolating, the challenges heightened by the day-to-night transition of infant care, she said—‘seeing the sun come up and then seeing the sun go down and knowing you’re in it, nowhere to go, no escape,’” The Atlantic stated.
“Eventually, infant pressures were replaced by toddler demands; she still felt isolated and yearned for support even more. Before pregnancy and breastfeeding, Mitchem told me, she sometimes turned to weed to feel more balanced when she struggled with anxiety and ADHD. So by the time her kid was two and a half, she decided to resume her old morning ritual: She began to smoke daily—‘gardening,’ as she calls it. Parenting, she said, became less stressful. ‘Life is hard,’ she said. ‘If you can have something that can take the edge off a little bit, why not?’” The story continued.
My first instinct was shock that anyone would admit publicly to using weed to cope with motherhood. Whatever happened to graciously embracing suffering? I immediately thought about how weak our society had become for this to be a rising norm among mothers. So much so that my algorithm constantly feeds me influencer-style videos of women smoking weed in their basements or garages before the kids wake up.
But then the sympathy set in because I fundamentally understand why they are doing this. It’s not to cope with motherhood as a whole, although that is what the excuse is. These women are unfortunately self-medicating due to modern motherhood and the isolation that comes with it.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a pro-weed or anti-motherhood newsletter. As a mother of four who constantly advocates for women to have children or have MORE children, you will never hear me suggest the opposite. However, there are serious issues with modern motherhood that need to be addressed.
If you’ve caught on by now, I keep using the term “modern motherhood” for a reason. Because our journey as mothers looks completely different from what generations before us endured. GenX and Millennial mothers are the first to experience being forced into a two-income household. In previous generations, a working mother was a situation that was reserved for widows, divorcees, and women whose husbands had abandoned their families. Every now and then, a married woman would have children and willingly go back to work, but these were outliers, never the norm.
But now the majority of women I know work, not because they want to, but because they have to make sure ends meet. This means their children are in daycare or under a nanny’s care instead of being at home with their mother. The guilt that comes along with this reality isn’t something that women are supposed to express. Instead, it is something that they are required to suppress “for the greater good.”
At best, working mothers get six to eight weeks of maternity leave. Most don’t get any. While they are still recovering from postpartum and all the physical and hormonal trauma that comes along with it, they have to make plans to do this in a sterile office rather than the comfort of their bed with their newborn baby nearby.
This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, not with extended maternity leave but by creating economic policies that make raising a family on a single income more accessible. I feel blessed that this was my reality. I didn’t start writing until after all of my children were in school. I got the weeks of recovery and the peace of being with my children for every moment of their early childhood, which is why I know how important it is to make this a reality for other mothers.
Still, even without the burden of leaving your children for an office job, modern motherhood is a curse. Let me explain.
When people say it takes a village to raise a child, what they mean is that for the most part, women have never had to do it all on their own. Previous generations lived near other relatives. Their parents, grandparents, siblings, etc., all lived in the same town or even the same house. The moment a child was brought into this world, the new mother was surrounded by other women who cared for her and the baby. They made meals, helped clean the house, and helped comfort the new baby so the mother could rest.
Women weren’t alone. The burden of the newborn stage, with its sleepless nights and constant adjustment, was never shouldered solely by the mother. She had help from people who loved her. The “Is this normal?” questions were answered by experienced mothers and not left to the imagination. Anxiety, depression, and isolation were lowered because the fear was handled by a group.
I will never condone self-medication, but I do understand why it’s a growing trend. Modern motherhood now requires that women do all of this alone.
As my daughters get older and we begin fantasizing about what their future lives will look like, they have all told me that they want to be married with a gaggle of children. One of my fears is that their life path will take them away from me. I’d be lying if I said this had nothing to do with how much I’d miss them, because it definitely plays a part in that. But really, it’s because I have had to go through the isolation of raising them without my family around, and I never want that to be their life.
So I am constantly telling them that they need to plan to live close to their sisters and me when the time comes. I tell them stories about how it was for me to be postpartum and how much of a blessing it would have been to have family close by to support me when I felt weak.
A lot of mothers fear they’ll sound controlling or that their daughters will resent them for telling them to live close by, but the alternative is that their daughters will experience the darkest loneliness, states away, with no one to help. If we want to save our daughters from this reality, we have to tell them the truth: You will need help.
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I dunno. Women used to drink a lot with small kids. And let’s not forget the ‘mothers little helpers’. Self medicating is what it is.