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How Society Judges Mothers No Matter What They Do

Caroline Egan
5 min readNov 1, 2021

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Mother, lover, and worker; the impossible triangle.

Photo by Richard Jaimes on Unsplash

Before I start ranting here, I’d just like to say that I like being a mam. My kid can be a pain in the arse, but I am happy that I have him and love him unconditionally. That said, I think it should be OK to give out about your kid wrecking your buzz without feeling guilty. It’s not this perfect little bubble of joy.

And that, my friends, is the main point to this hopefully structured and coherent rant about being a mam. Feeling guilty and being a mother are two things that inhabit that little bit of a Venn diagram. They overlap so much.

Society bombards mothers with imagery of the self-sacrificing mother. She has no needs or identity of her own. She is always putting her child ahead of herself.

Those who dare to venture outside of those parameters… well, they’re not very good mothers are they?

You can be perfect and have it all, right? Oh wait, you have it all; you’re doing it wrong!

But no matter what the media will tell you, whatever you are doing, staying at home, working, or even choosing not to have kids, that you are doing it wrong.

Specifically, in my instance as a younger mother (he’s nearly an adult now), I felt like the media was constantly…

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Caroline Egan
Caroline Egan

Written by Caroline Egan

Nerdy, freelance writer, feminist, horror/sci-fi enthusiast, mother, big child. Support me and become a member here: https://eganc3.medium.com/membership

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