I said I was fine. I wasn’t.
As I sit down to write this, I’m still not sure how much of it to share.
Part of me knows I had it easier than many. I had support. I had access to help. There are mothers carrying far more than I ever did. And social media has made us all strange about hardship — we watch people get criticised for sharing challenges that are not deemed challenging enough, we start to believe that hard has to earn its place before it can be spoken about.
But there is another reason I hesitate. One day my kids might read this. And I never want them to think there was something wrong with them. There wasn’t. There were moments of joy, gratitude and genuine awe in my early motherhood. But there were other things happening too.
When I became a mum, my life was unstable in ways I had not fully reckoned with. I was an Australian expat in the US, far from home, and my partner was living in another state, so my family came to help, and I told myself I was prepared.
Around day four, basically the moment I came home from the hospital, something switched.
I cried constantly. I was emotional, overwhelmed, anxious. I figured it was the baby blues, the normal fog of new motherhood. At first it felt like ordinary first-time-mother worry: checking my baby’s breathing at all hours, lying awake with that horrible phrase: cold babies cry, hot babies die, looping in my head through the night, checking his temperature 24/7.
Then it kept going.
Breastfeeding became the centre of everything. It did not come naturally to me, and I became obsessed with whether he was getting enough milk. Even though my baby was thriving, I was convinced he was not. I had lactation consultants come to the house to weigh him before and after every feed. I avoided feeding in public because I could not bear anyone to see me struggling, so I isolated myself.
My child was doing well. I was not.
Every evening, dread would settle in. My baby was unsettled, I was exhausted, and I kept telling myself: it’s not that bad. Other babies woke up more. I had heard of babies waking every 30 minutes. Mine didn’t do that. “This is motherhood”, I told myself. Of course, it’s hard.
This, I have come to understand, is one of the most dangerous things we do to mothers. We teach them to measure their breaking point against someone else’s, instead of stopping to ask whether they are breaking at all.
Each evening, when my parents attempted to head back to their Airbnb, I wouldn’t let my mum leave. So she stayed. Having her in the house made an enormous difference. But I never woke her overnight, because there was nothing she could do. I needed to feed. And maybe, if there had not been so much guilt attached to formula, I might have caught a break. But at the time, I believed that good motherhood meant putting myself last.
I think that belief deserves more scrutiny than we ever give it.
I had unconsciously started measuring myself by how little I needed and how much I could endure. I thought exhaustion meant commitment. And because I was struggling too much to see it clearly, self-neglect had become a way of showing love. If I were suffering, at least it proved I was taking motherhood seriously.
Somewhere along the way, many of us absorb the idea that sacrifice is evidence of being a good mother. That if you are rested, if you ask for help, if you protect parts of yourself outside of motherhood, perhaps you are not doing enough. We celebrate maternal devotion so completely, so reflexively, that we rarely stop to ask where devotion ends, and depletion begins.
But becoming a mother should not require becoming less of a person. Your needs do not become irrelevant the moment someone else appears.
So I carried on. And so did my thoughts, which only got darker and more intrusive. I fantasised about running away. One night, holding my baby, I hallucinated. For a moment, I thought he had the eyes of a demon. I was terrified.
And yet, if anyone had asked how I was doing, I would have said, “I’m good.”
That is what I said on my postpartum assessments, too. I lied, partly because I was trying to conceal it, partly because I genuinely did not know where the line was. What was matrescence? What was PPD? What was simply the weight of a new life reorganising everything around it? I am still working that out. But one thing I now understand: even if some of what I felt was normal, that does not mean it was meant to be carried alone, in silence.
Today I am president at Peanut, the world’s largest online community for women across fertility, pregnancy and motherhood. Part of why I work here is that, during that period, Peanut was one of the few places I felt seen. Women were sharing the raw, confusing, layered version of motherhood I couldn’t yet say out loud.
Together with baby stroller company Nuna, we have just released the first Motherhood Index, analysing over 500,000 conversations from mothers on our platform and surveying over 4,000 women around the world. And the statistic I have not been able to stop thinking about is this:
61 per cent of mothers describe their mental well-being as ‘good’. Yet 93 per cent say they experience burnout always or often.
So what have we let ‘good’ come to mean for mothers?
Good, it seems, now means surviving on broken sleep. Carrying the majority of the domestic load. Feeling guilty as a baseline state. Losing pieces of your identity with no clear path back to them. Watching your career shift beneath you in ways you weren’t warned about. Needing support that never arrives, and still, somehow, convincing yourself you’re fine.
That is not good. That is mothers recalibrating their expectations downward, one concession at a time, in order to survive.
If 93 per cent of mothers are burned out and still calling themselves good, the question is not whether mothers are okay, it’s whether society is.
Lead images: Michelle Battersby/Instagram
The post ‘I Said I Was Fine. I Wasn’t’: Michelle Battersby On The Reckoning We Need To Have About Motherhood appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
