When I became a mom I made a decision that was probably partly conscious and partly subconscious to try really hard not to feel bad asking for help. I think this is a response to watching mothers around me struggle in various capacities throughout my life and making the implicit calculation that more help would reduce my struggle. Being able to afford paid help as part of a care team is a huge part of the conversation too, and creates new struggles in different ways. Lately with a new baby we’ve been leaning a lot more on neighbors and local friends, which has become a two way street and actually feels really nice and has fortified our sense of community.
thank you for sharing and opening up this conversation, Sarah.
I've always been envious of people who had neighbors and local friends to lean on. We're trying to build that now, but it's harder now that our kids are so much older. And I think because we *were* able to afford help when our kids were younger, and then later we relied on the help available at the school where I worked and which the kids attended, we may have missed out on the chance to build community with other families close to us. And now I feel like I really have to work to build community as an end in itself! Great lesson that asking for help can have upsides that we might never even imagine.
Adjacent to this whole conversation is the expectation that we, as working mothers, are *expected* to field it all, be the whole care team (let’s not forget here that we are all also daughters, which sometimes comes with caring for aging parents at this point in life). It’s not only an internal mindset shift, but a cultural one: we need to start expecting that we help each other and that others will ask for help, not put the ‘mom doing it all’ on a pedestal.
I think we have a big uphill battle to knock the "mom doing it all" off the pedestal societally. So I wonder what the small ways are that we can model asking for help in our micro-communities and start to normalize it in that tiny way.
When I became a mom I made a decision that was probably partly conscious and partly subconscious to try really hard not to feel bad asking for help. I think this is a response to watching mothers around me struggle in various capacities throughout my life and making the implicit calculation that more help would reduce my struggle. Being able to afford paid help as part of a care team is a huge part of the conversation too, and creates new struggles in different ways. Lately with a new baby we’ve been leaning a lot more on neighbors and local friends, which has become a two way street and actually feels really nice and has fortified our sense of community.
thank you for sharing and opening up this conversation, Sarah.
I've always been envious of people who had neighbors and local friends to lean on. We're trying to build that now, but it's harder now that our kids are so much older. And I think because we *were* able to afford help when our kids were younger, and then later we relied on the help available at the school where I worked and which the kids attended, we may have missed out on the chance to build community with other families close to us. And now I feel like I really have to work to build community as an end in itself! Great lesson that asking for help can have upsides that we might never even imagine.
Adjacent to this whole conversation is the expectation that we, as working mothers, are *expected* to field it all, be the whole care team (let’s not forget here that we are all also daughters, which sometimes comes with caring for aging parents at this point in life). It’s not only an internal mindset shift, but a cultural one: we need to start expecting that we help each other and that others will ask for help, not put the ‘mom doing it all’ on a pedestal.
I think we have a big uphill battle to knock the "mom doing it all" off the pedestal societally. So I wonder what the small ways are that we can model asking for help in our micro-communities and start to normalize it in that tiny way.
What a lot to think about! I carry A LOT. Thank you for sharing all of this truth, Sarah.