Why Don't People Talk About Parenthood The Way I Want Them To?

On internet debates, "toxic" positivity, and the joy of reading a picture book

“I am begging parents, especially new parents, and especially mothers— to post their positive experiences with parenthood. Please!! You have no idea how depressing the mainstream parenting stories currently are!!” someone recently tweeted.

I had to pause for a moment when I read this, because the sentiment hit home— and didn’t.

Because I’ve seen many iterations of another question asking almost the opposite: “why didn’t anyone tell me being a parent would be this hard? Why is no one talking about this?”

The very simple answer that makes sense of these two extremes is, of course, that there are a lot of people talking about lots of things on the internet and many different perspectives—but I think there’s more to it than that.

The Pendulum

Perfect parenting abounds on social media: the posed Facebook pictures with all the children smiling perfectly in pristine white button-down shirts on a beach, the Instagram reels of serene mamas (never moms! only mamas) making sourdough bread from scratch, the TikToks with that infernal half-dance, half-pointing-to-text-overlay routine where a parent chirpily explains a “life hack” for getting a recalcitrant toddler to wash their hands/learn their colors/eat the rainbow/recite the Preamble to the Constitution. Everyone is confident and capable, yea, even unto smugness. “This is so easy,” they seem to say. “If I can do it, you can too. Stop complaining. Pull up your bootstraps. Buy my e-book. Cherish every moment. You’re gonna miss this, gosh darn it.”

I think there’s a screenshot of this kind of thing beside the definition of “toxic positivity” on Urban Dictionary. Don’t fact-check me on that, though.

And in response to this cherry-picked aspirationalism (wait, that’s not a word? Well, it should be) the pendulum swung to the other end, and a whole genre of Hot Mess Parenting Content was born. This type is more Relatable. It’s full of memes and tweets, not so heavy on the video content, and it’s up front about the Bad and the Ugly. It’s the diaper explosions, the library storytime tantrums, the potty training woes and cleaning out the car seat. It’s the grim realities of postpartum and the absolute exhaustion of a long weekend in bad weather. And the question it asks is not “why can’t you do everything beautifully just like me?” but “why is no one talking about how hard all this is?”

“People try to avoid making it seem like it’s all snuggly babies and well-behaved toddlers who would never purposely flood a Montessori vegetable garden,” Lucy Huber wrote in Time. “We finally started speaking up about issues that were being ignored like postpartum depression. We allowed TV fathers to be emotional and stopped depicting mothers as rosy-cheeked June Cleavers who have time to make their family waffles every morning and maintain a perm. But maybe, when it came to talking about parenthood, we overcorrected. We forgot to keep sharing the good stuff in addition to the bad.”

Inadvertently, of course, the Grungy Reality side is making things hard for new parents too. And it spawns the tweet I quoted at the beginning: why is everyone so negative? Where are the positive stories? Why are you making this sound terrible?

Ultimately I believe there is room for compassion for both positions. (I don’t have a ton of compassion for people who make the sparkly condescending Instagram reels with links to buy expensive products though. Sorry. They can cry about it on the way to the bank I guess.) I think we need to acknowledge that people who have been exposed to a more curated, good-looking, best-case-scenario vision of parenthood will naturally feel shell-shocked when they bring the baby home from the hospital and realize that they still have to wake up every 45 minutes (two hours if they’re lucky!) to feed a screaming newborn, while healing from childbirth/sleep deprivation/major abdominal surgery. And I think we need to acknowledge that people who are thinking about having kids, and who see (what feels like) a constant barrage of social media posts about the death of parents’ social lives and articles about how parents feel stressed and exhausted and anxious, will naturally feel apprehensive about bringing a child into the world if it looks so… well, awful.

I’m a new mom, relatively speaking. Andy is not quite three-and-a-half at the time of this writing, and Ben is ten months old.¹ I’m very hesitant to speak in an advisory way. I love writing about my parenting journey, but I try to stick to storytelling rather than instructional moralizing, and whenever possible I try to avoid using the word “journey” because it’s been worn to a raveling.

And if you’ll pardon me some light moralizing just this once, I think storytelling is actually where we might find a happy medium. Or a dirty centrism. Whatever you want to call it.

We Should All Read More Stories

When I began therapy for postpartum depression and anxiety last year, one of the major topics of my discussions with my therapist was my fears over “ruining” my children. Before the miracle of modern medicine began to save my sanity if not my actual life (I was never that far gone, but I was pretty darned miserable) I would waste cumulative hours upon hours worrying and agonizing over every little mistake, every choice and decision. If I was too lenient with my toddler I feared I might turn him into a spoiled brat; if too strict, maybe I was emotionally abusing him. My therapist, whom I have grown to love like a real friend (is that ethical? I think it’s okay as long as it’s unrequited) was firm and no-nonsense about the problem as she saw it: I had to stop reading parenting advice online.

And I did.

And… it helped. A lot.

So did the psychiatric prescription, but the recipe for working through anxiety is meds plus therapy, and therapy is about counseling but also putting in the work, and one of the things I had to work at was letting go of my appetite for here’s-how-to-fix-it instruction.

A year later, I’m coming down off the pregnancy and postpartum hormones and feeling my body and mind settle back into myself. I’m calmer, lighter, more grounded, less manic. I’ve unfollowed a lot of Instagram accounts and Facebook pages and even a couple of Substacks. I’ve selected the books I read with much more care. And the writings about parenthood that I find myself turning to are not didactic or twee or full of complaints; they are, instead, stories of humor and tears and everyday extraordinaries. They are about real people doing real things and talking about where they’ve been and how the days-in, days-out have shaped them; love letters to the mundane.

These days, I read Bunmi Laditan and

Beccy

and

Andrew Knott

and Lindsay Hameroff and

Rachel Joy Welcher

and

Meg

and

Julie Vick

and

Jeremy

and

James Breakwell

and

Haley Stewart

and Lucy Huber. I relish the stories they tell and the grace and honesty with which they talk freely about the beauty and humor and, yes, the mess and frustration that comes with raising little people. Some of them lean toward the funny and some toward the introspective. All of them leave me wishing for more glimpses into their life and how they live it. Not, like, in a creepy way. Just in a way that appreciates their vulnerability in simply talking about the happiness and the hard things and the hyper-exhaustion that is inevitable in every parenting saga whether you’re whipping up organic grass-fed muffins or careening through the Taco Bell drive-thru.

Where My Joys Linger

Now we’ll get reflective to close this.

Because this morning I was running around fixing coffee and making some hastily-scrambled eggs before church. Andy, my three-year-old, knelt in his raccoon pajamas at the dining table and pushed Clifford’s First Valentine’s Day under my nose. “Will you read to me?”

“I will after I get my coffee ready,” I told him. “I love reading to you, buddy.”

“Except when you are BUSY,” he reminded me. (Ouch.)

“Well, I can’t always read to you when I am busy,” I said, “but I always love reading to you. It’s one of my favorite parts of my day.”

And it is. I fail to measure up to my own standards of motherhood with embarrassing frequency. My tone is not always as gentle as I would like; my patience is not as long; my imagination is not as free; my skills in crafting and drawing chalk pictures and assembling magna-tile railway stations are not as sharp; my house is not as clean nor my meals as balanced as I wish they could be. But I revel in reading aloud. I’m good at it. I genuinely enjoy it. And the perseverance I’ve put into reading to Andy almost every single day since he was born (with allowances for sickness and the birth of his little brother) has paid off: he loves stories and will sit, uncharacteristically quiet and still, for thirty minutes or more paging through his favorite Richard Scarry and Shirley Hughes books.

I try to read aloud ten books a day. I don’t always hit that number. Sometimes the ten are only made possible by a Libby audiobook while we eat dinner (Mercy Watson’s porcine collection by Kate DiCamillo is the current favorite) or a hasty Horns to Toes and In Between right before Ben goes to bed. We read in the rocking chair before Andy has quiet time in the afternoon (alas for the preschooler’s nap! It has gone the way of the dodo and the dinosaur), in the car while my husband drives, on our weary green leather couch that has sunk so far into itself that it is almost a floor bed. Andy holds the book and turns the pages, sometimes necessitating a “slow down, let me finish” from me. Ben sits on my lap and alternately flips through or chews his own board book; his best-beloved is Ten Little Ladybugs. We read easy-readers like Frog and Toad, Mr. Putter and Tabby or Henry and Mudge, rhyming romps like The Seven Silly Eaters, Beatrix Potter classics like Mrs. Tittlemouse and Jeremy Fisher, absurdities like The Book With No Pictures, linguistic cleverness that mostly flies over Andy’s head like Amelia Bedelia, lengthy meandering stories with black-and-white pictures like One Morning in Maine and Make Way for Ducklings and Bread and Jam for Frances.

It’s taken time and effort, redirection and repetition. Andy’s attention span is brief and feckless for many other things, but he’ll snuggle for a twelve-minute book with minimal illustrations. I’m proud of that. I can’t help it. His vocabulary has grown and his imagination has soared. He has favorites and not-so-fonds. He makes commentary and fills in the pauses and shouts “my only friend in the whole wide world is a hippo named Boo Boo Butt!” at inopportune times.

The early-morning sends a line of glare through our easternmost living room window and I get up with Ben clutched in the crook of my elbow to turn the blinds upward. Back on the couch, Andy leans against me, hair sticking up from his cowlick and soapy-sweet to my nose. He is warm and solid, so small and so close. Someday he will read on his own. Someday he will no longer ask for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel or Franklin in the Dark. Someday I will wish I could remember this moment more vividly.

I swear on the grave of my father, Domingo Montoya, that I will never make an Instagram reel telling other apron-clad mamas to cherish every moment. Nor will I take my rock-bottom times of exasperated burnout to the farthest regions of the public interwebs. But I will write about these read-aloud times because when I look back into my memories for a positive parenting experience to tell a new mom, here they will be, preserved forever.

My story will, I hope, be one full of stories.

Thanks for reading this one.

1. If you’re new to this newsletter and know me in real life, you might be raising an eyebrow— I use pseudonyms for my sons to protect their privacy online. Andy and Ben are not their real names. Thanks for helping me keep that privacy intact by not using their real names if you choose to comment!