Why Motherhood Feels So Much Harder Than It Looked For Our Mums

It's not that we're weaker. It's not that we love our kids less. It's that we're being asked to do something no generation of mothers has ever been asked to do — and nobody named it for us.

You're tired. You're spread thin. You're behind on washing and behind on yourself. And somewhere underneath the day, a quiet thought keeps coming up.

Why does this feel so much harder than it looked for our mums?

If you've ever asked it, I want to tell you something. The answer isn't that we're weaker than they were. It isn't that we love our kids less, or care less, or try less. It's that we're being asked to do something they were never asked to do.

The thing nobody named

Your mum got seasons.

Not perfect ones. Not always the ones she wanted. But she got them. There was a stretch when babies and small children were the main thing. Then a stretch when the kids were at school and she could go back to work, or take up a hobby, or just have ten minutes to herself. Then a stretch where she had a bit more time again.

Whether she stayed home, worked part-time, or worked full-time — the cultural script said one thing at a time. The bar for good mother was high. The bar for successful career woman was high. But you weren't expected to clear both bars in the same week.

Today, you are.

That's not a personal failing. That's a maths problem.

What the numbers actually show

Here's what's happened to our generation, in plain numbers.

So we entered paid work at scale — fair enough, we needed the income, and many of us wanted the work. But the unpaid work didn't get redistributed when we started doing the paid work. The workload doubled and the support stayed the same.

And while we were quietly absorbing all of that, the bar for good mother kept rising. Sleep tracking. Screen tracking. Snack tracking. Milestone tracking. Present parenting. Gentle parenting. Educational play. None of that existed forty years ago.

That's the maths problem.

"But she had it harder"

If you've ever said this to yourself — she had less money, she had no maternity leave, she had no choices, who am I to complain? — please hear this.

Your mum probably did have it harder in some ways. Many of those ways were genuinely brutal, and a lot of women in her generation paid a real price for them.

But harder in different ways doesn't mean easier overall. It means the system was unfair to her in one shape, and it's unfair to us in another shape. Both can be true. You're not betraying her by naming yours.

The same goes for the men in our lives. Most of our partners are not refusing to help. Most of them are doing more than their dads ever did. The fact that there's still a gap isn't because they're bad — it's because the whole system was built around their absence from caregiving, and undoing that takes more than goodwill.

Why this hits so hard in matrescence

Matrescence is the word for the huge change you go through when you become a mother. It changes your body, your brain, your identity. It is one of the biggest transitions in a human life.

Now imagine going through that transition while also being expected to perform every other role you had before, plus several new ones. You're trying to figure out who you are now — and you don't have a single afternoon to sit with it.

Your mum went through matrescence inside a culture that gave her one big role at a time.

You are going through matrescence inside a culture that hands you all of them at once and asks why you look so tired.

What helps

I'm not going to tell you the answer is to try harder, get more organised, or use this app. You've heard those answers. They don't help.

What helps is naming what's actually happening. Seeing that the heaviness is not a personal flaw — it's the predictable result of a system that asks too much of mothers and quietly increases the ask every year.

When you can see that, something changes inside you. The question stops being what's wrong with me? and becomes what's wrong with this?

That shift doesn't fix the system. It won't make tomorrow's school run any easier.

But it gives you back something that intensive mothering quietly took away from you — the right to say "this is too much," and to know it isn't your fault.

Jade x