We Need to Stop Pathologizing Motherhood

“There’s something wrong with me,” the mother thinks to herself, too embarrassed to say it out loud. She thinks it’s a “me problem”.

We’ve moved beyond mom guilt at this point.

It’s transformed into maternal shame: the deeply seated feelings of failure, inadequacy and lack of ‘enoughness’ that too many mothers experience today as a result of being a mother within patriarchal motherhood, as described by maternal scholars Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly.

It’s these same theorists who have declared that “Motherhood is oppressive,” to directly quote Rich. So while the recent Surgeon General’s warning declaring parenting is harmful to your health is a landmark moment.

It also isn’t news.

Mothers have known this inherently for a very long time. Our grandmothers have known this, too. However, as O’Reilly states, it is the hardest time in recorded history to be a mother due to the extenuating cultural norms that plague mothers today.

As a matricentric feminist psychotherapist and a maternal activist, I support mothers at the intersection of their matrescence and patriarchal Motherhood, or Motherhood with a capital M. And the news we received this week gives me hope.

The mother who sits alone in her home, lonely, burned out, rageful at times, exhausted, depleted, anxious and depressed, now has the “permission” to begin to talk about it, thanks to this announcement.

She may have felt embarrassed to ask for help or admit that it’s hard before now… because a “good mother” enjoys every moment of it, and since she wanted to be a mother, she shouldn’t complain—an all-too-common line of thinking.

She’s the foundation of her family, of which so many would crumble if she showed any “weakness”, so she pushes through the emotional and physical pain, only finding herself less fulfilled by her role as mother than she ever imagined she would be.

She’s held space all day for her child as she aims to embody the gentle parenting manifesto, but then has no space to hold herself at the end of the day.

Every human has a breaking point—and mothers have been hitting theirs. The pandemic only exasperated this. Remember when scream circles became a cultural norm?

Maybe burnout, rage, anxiety and exhaustion are all normal reactions to attempting to live up to standards that are impossible for any human being.

We need to stop pathologizing Motherhood.

She doesn’t need to be fixed. She isn’t broken. Maybe there isn’t anything “wrong” with her: maybe it’s a lack of systemic support, a lack of valuing mother-work, a lack of flexibility in her workplace, the prevalence of traditional gender roles at home, the ideology of intensive mothering that causes these symptoms.

Maybe she is mothering within a patriarchal system of cultural norms that restrict, confine, minimize, dismiss, overlook and use her. This is only magnified for marginalized mothers (that’s the majority of mothers, by the way).

Maybe she’s been asking for help for a long time only to be reminded that it’s her job, her primary responsibility and the ultimate essence of fully being a “woman”.

Maybe it isn’t a “me problem” but a “we problem”—and she finally sees that today.

And now, she can finally start talking about it. Maybe even advocating for changing it.

When mothers have the courage and space to speak the shame that keeps them isolated from real connections, scared of being judged, not just by others, but even by themselves… the shame begins to go away.

When we center the Mother, when we value care-work, when we set up policies that tangibly support families, then everyone is better off. Raising children is our society’s responsibility, as Dr. Murthy writes to remind us. And it’s time we show up that way.