No matter how you go about it, being a mother isn’t easy. Moreover, every “form” of motherhood — working mom, birth mom, adoptive mom, stepmom — comes with its own set of challenges. TikTok user “Syd,” who posts as @eclectichomeschooling, recently posted a video highlighting the unique conundrums she’s experienced as a stay-at-home mom. And her musings have resonated with her followers.
“Something that I think that a lot of people don’t realize about being a stay-at-home mom, whether you are a homeschool mom or your kids are young and you’re staying home with them during those years, is that there’s no measurement of success. There’s no metric,” she begins.
“There’s no one saying ‘congratulations, you have been promoted; you are the top of the top of this skill.’ None of that.”
Sure, Syd continues, you can get compliments about how you’re parenting your children, but that’s not the same thing as being able to track success.
“It feels good and it makes us happy and it makes us feel loved to give love, but it’s not something you can hold or write down.”
The things you can measure, on the other hand? Those tend not to speak to any measure of advancement for a stay-at-home mom. Is the house clean? Is the laundry done? What about the dishes? One can rarely answer “yes” to every single thing that will eventually need to be done.
“When you’re tying your success to this thing that you spend 24 hours a day doing to things that have to do with you as a person as well, it can be really draining,” she says. “For you to be a perfect parent in a measurable way it will be literally not having a second of rest ever and everything in your life appearing to be perfect, but we know that’s not real, right? We know that’s not healthy for a person. So then you go back to just, like, not having any sort of validation, really.”
Syd isn’t too down on herself, she knows she’s lovable and a good mom, partner, and friend. She even jokingly acknowledges that part of this melancholy “rant” has to do with PMS. But…
“We’re going on eight years of not being able to measure [my success as a person],” she laments. “I think that that’s a thing that nobody really talks about or that we don’t really get to talk about with each other. Your partner goes to work: they get promoted, they get raises, they complete their work for the day and they … get to be like ‘OK, I succeeded.’ But [workload] is just constant, all of the time, and there’s no metric for it.”
She doesn’t have a solution or even a conclusion to her feelings: the video is a combination rant and conversation starter. She muses that stay-at-home moms perhaps take more time for hobbies, something outside of her everyday life, to find that sense of progress and success, but ultimately she doesn’t know if there is a solution to this very real issue.
“No one could have ever explained this to me before I was a SAHM,” one commenter responds. “It is, on my best days, interesting to notice how tied we are to corporate-style success. On my worst, it is inescapably crushing.”
“It’s the never-ending loops that are never complete,” agrees another. “We never get the satisfaction of a ‘job well done’ because nothing is ever really done. Once I started focusing on my own happiness, it got better.”
Others noted that being a mom, particularly a stay-at-home mom often means that things done well are unremarked upon but failures are magnified, not just by yourself but others.
Like Syd, we also don’t have an answer to this problem. But we do think that talking about it amongst ourselves, mom to mom can really help vent some of that frustration and get us to a place where we can appreciate that a lack of measurable, externally acknowledged progress doesn’t mean a lack of value or, for that matter, progress.
