Art by Leslie Graff, lesliegraff.com
Let’s say you’re a young mother in 1951, overwhelmed by this new parenting gig you’ve just gotten yourself into. You don’t have Google to help you figure it all out. But you do have a shiny new six-volume set of the Mother’s Encyclopedia, which came free with your subscription to Parents’ Magazine.
You turn to the entry conveniently titled Mother’s Job, to find out what the heck you’re supposed to do now, and you read this:
“Motherhood is a job. Some women are successful at it and some are failures.”
It gets worse.
“It is not easy to be a good mother. For the good mother has to be an all-round good person all the time. She has no time off during which she can let down and indulge her human failings. Whatever she does, whatever she is, comes back in direct effect upon her job. Mothers have to be Good People if they wish to develop Good Children.”
Then when you fall short of these lofty requirements, you better not feel any guilt because that will ruin your kids even more. It goes on to say,
“One of the reasons we have such dreadful children today—in some families—is because the parents suffer perpetually from a sense of guilt toward their children.”
And I saved the worst quote for last. She says,
“Some medical men are even beginning to say that morning sickness does not appear when the woman loves her husband and desires her baby.”
Imagine reading that while you’re pregnant and puking your guts out!
I hold no ill will against the current evolution of Parents’ Magazine, or even the early one, for the atrocities in the article I just quoted. In fact, I applaud any organization trying to make sense of this difficult job of raising children. But because it was such a crazy article, I went down a rabbit hole to learn more about the author, Dr. Lorine Pruette, and discovered that she was a psychologist who had a difficult relationship with her own mother and no children of her own. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes of this article that I don’t have the time or expertise to unpack, so we’ll leave Lorine and all of her baggage back in the 50s and move on.
The truth is, almost 70 years since that awful article was written, we all fall into the good mom/bad mom trap sometimes. And we all start our motherhood career with our own ideas of what a good mom does. But the only moms who are truly bad are those who abuse or neglect their children. And that’s a small minority. Any mom who is trying is a good mom. And you’re trying so hard that you’re reading an article about motherhood.
Motherhood is a loaded word, full of social, historical, cultural, and familial expectations and responsibilities. Yet, as we all know, there are no prerequisites and no formal training—not even a job interview—required to assume this position.
We’ve all read articles that break down the many hats moms wear while they juggle balls in the form of children and housework and birthday parties and jobs and side gigs. But rather than being intimidated and utterly overwhelmed by this long list of duties, we can choose to be liberated by it. Since no one person can possibly be good at all of them, we get to choose the ones that we’re going to prioritize, which our spouses are going to take on (if we have one), what we’re going to outsource to someone else, and which of the balls we’re just going to drop.
We get to write our own job descriptions.
True, some of us have more freedom to choose what we do than others. Some of us work long hours. Some of us have no spouse to share in all the duties of caring for children and running a household. Some of us are limited by financial constraints. Some of us are limited by our own health or the health of our loved ones. Some of us have fewer children than we would have chosen due to fertility issues, miscarriages, or the death of children. Some of us have more children than we anticipated. But despite the constraints of our individual circumstances, we still have some choices about how we will spend the time we have with our kids.
Because we’re all in such different circumstances, everyone’s job description is a little different. And that’s a beautiful thing. Each mother gets to customize the job to her own talents, interests, values, and priorities. And of course, to the unique children we’re mothering.
Like most careers, a mom’s job description is fluid and changes drastically over time. When we’re pregnant for the first time, we all have this idealistic image of what kind of mother we will be—and then we bring our actual baby home and we quickly realize how wrong that image was. Our ideas about perfect parenting go out the window and we just do our best to figure out what the heck we’re doing.
Another distinction I’d like to make here is that although I typically include household management and motherhood under the overarching name of How She Moms, because many of us are in charge of both, it’s important to recognize that they are not the same thing. It’s easy to intertwine the jobs of homemaking and motherhood because the two jobs are often simultaneous. We bounce back and forth between them whenever we’re at home. But separating the two allows us to really think about our goals for each. Blogger Rebecca Brown Right, wrote a beautiful post called “Housekeeping Is Not Motherhood.”
She says, “Your “success” as a mother is not defined by domestic duties. Domestic duties are part of being an adult. … You can hire someone to clean your house and feed your kids, and you’ll still be a mom. And if you weren’t a mom, you’d still have to clean your house, cook food, and do laundry.”
For a while, our job as a mom is mostly focused on those bottom two steps of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – providing for our baby’s physiological needs, like food, sleep, clothing, and safety. Then as our children grow, we start to move up the pyramid to their emotional, social, and psychological needs.
Darla Lindsey, one of my many motherhood mentors, is a mother of four, all of whom have now graduated from high school and left home. Here’s her take on the evolution of a mom’s job:
“When your children are young, they’re very demanding physically. You have to bathe them, feed them, get them dressed. You have to buckle them in every time you go somewhere. And you have to unbuckle them. It requires a lot of physical strength. But you have pretty much control over their environment, and their emotional needs.
That totally does a 180 as they get older. I call this the golden years. When you no longer have to buckle them into car seats and they can stand up in the pool and they can get their own cereal, you know you’ve arrived as a mom.
But then the oldest one starts getting into a time where school gets harder, relationships get harder, and the emotional battles get harder. It just kind of flips. You don’t expend nearly as much energy with the physical work, but trying to support and give guidance while still allowing them freedom to make their own decisions—that extends into young adulthood.”
And interestingly, the more experience we have as mothers, the shorter our job description usually becomes, partly because our children become more self-sufficient, but also because we start to refine our idea of what really matters.
Celeste Davis is a mother of four children. Even with so many kids, her job description is much shorter now than it used to be:
“When I was in my early years of parenting, I took on all the roles. I was in charge of their comfort and their entertainment and their schedules and their happiness and all of their emotions and their successes—all the things. I was in charge of how they were turning out and their behavior at all times.
It was so stressful, and I’d be embarrassed about how they acted in public, I’d be embarrassed if they were failing—I was just taking on everything.
I’ve just kind of whittled it down over the years to ‘I am in charge of loving them unconditionally and I am in charge of modelling emotional behavior and that is it. Those are my two goals of motherhood.”
In addition to being an emotionally intelligent mother, Celeste is a talented writer and podcaster at marriagelaboratory.com and the podcast Marriage Theraoke. You’ll be hearing more from her in some of my upcoming episodes.
Step One: Identify Your Purpose as a Mom
In the rest of this episode, I’m going to walk you through creating your own motherhood job description. I’ve put together a four-step job description worksheet for you in case you’d like to follow along with this episode and write a job description for yourself.
To get the worksheet, sign up for my newsletter here:
Like any thorough job description, the one you write for yourself should start at a strategic level. What are your main objectives as a mom? While researching this episode, I asked many moms this question. Here are some of their wise answers. Chantel Allen, a mom of four and a life coach, has narrowed her objectives to three main priorities:
“When I was younger I thought I had to hustle. I think that comes from the way we were brought up, and society tells us you have to have a clean house and you have to have dinner on the table—even though it’s never written anywhere it’s just kind of programmed into our brains, and I lived that way. I believed my kids should be happy and well behaved and my house should be clean—then I know I’m doing a good job as a mom.
And as I’ve done more coaching, I’ve understood that no, that’s out of my control whether my kids behave or not, whether my kids are happy or not. What’s in my control is what I can teach them.
So I have decided there are two or three things in my job description. I will love my children fearlessly, I will protect them, and I will teach them. It’s so beautiful because now I understand I don’t have to tell my kids they can’t feel a certain way. I don’t need them to be happy all of the time for me to feel like I’m doing a good job in my role as a mother.”
I also asked my friend Molly Liggett, a mother of six to weigh in with her objectives. She said,
“My main goal as a mother is to work myself out of a job. I want to raise capable adults who are kind and contribute to this world and make it a better place. So that’s my big major goal, but what I really love to do with my kids is instill in them a zest for learning and help them uncover what their talents and joys are.”
I also really loved Darla Lindsey’s answer to this question:
“One of my most important goals through all seasons of motherhood has been that of a champion. When I had my first daughter, I thought she would be like me. What I quickly discovered is that she was a unique individual with gifts and abilities that are quite unlike my own.
So as a mom to four very unique individuals I have tried to be their champion in whatever interests or talents or hobbies or educational and career pursuits or goals that they have wanted to pursue. I have one daughter who is a lawyer, one who is a biologist, one who is an accounting student and a son who dreams of being a pilot. Myself, I don’t feel passionate about any of them. But because they are, I am.
When my husband’s mother passed away ten years ago, he turned to me and said, ‘I feel like I have lost my greatest champion. The one who has defended me and believed in me no matter what.’ That really is who she was, and I’ve tried to emulate that.”
On the worksheet, I’ve listed several of these goals, including a list of some of the things you may want to teach your kids, so you can pick the ones that apply to you. But obviously, your own objectives should be highly customized to you, what you care about, and what you’re good at.
I love the way my friend Jen Brewer thinks about this. She’s a mother of seven kids, and like most of us, it took her a while to figure out her identity as a mom. She says,
“I went through a decade of depression. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back I can see I was not in a good place, because of that thought of ‘a good mom does this.’ You know, a good mom reads to her kids every night and makes all of her kids’ Halloween costumes. And I realized that I couldn’t do half of those things, so I was a bad mom.
I finally had an epiphany. My husband went to medical school and then did an internship year in internal medicine. He hated internal medicine. He would come home saying, ‘If I had to do this for the rest of my life I would die.’ His specialty is dermatology. He loves it. He’s twelve years into his field and he’s like a kid at Christmas going into work every day.
So I tried to explain it to him, ‘What if someone told you you get to be a doctor but being a doctor means you get to do internal medicine.’ He physically cringed. I said, ‘That’s what ift feels like to try and fit yourself into this mold of what it means to be a mom. Why can’t we as moms specialize.’
I finally owned up to the fact that I’m not a toddler mom. I’ve had toddlers for 15 years, and I’ve finally come to the realization that I don’t love that age. But I adore the teenage years. We can have meaty conversations. Bring me your hard problems and I’ll go through the trenches with you.”
I love the idea of specializing in specific fields of motherhood, just as if we were picking a medical specialty, and that we can specialize in specific stages.
You can also specialize based on your interests. Jen Young’s specialty is teaching kids to embrace and manage their emotions and to have a growth mindset. She says, “This doesn’t mean we’ve perfected any of it, it just means these are the things that are most important for me, personally, to teach them, so they’re the things I think about and focus on most often when we’re in a teachable moment.”
Jolynn Ross specializes in loving her kids unconditionally for who they are instead of trying to make them into who she thinks they should be. She also specializes in sharing crazy stories from her life to make them laugh.
When I asked my mom to Mom to tell me her specialty, she said, accurately, that she specializes in telling cautionary tales—stories about what happens when people make bad choices or don’t listen to their mothers. This is very true. And usually someone ends up dying.
But when I think about my own mother’s specialties, I think of how she taught us that she loves us and God loves us. She taught us to be curious and to love literature and poetry. And she taught us how to dig in and get things done. She also specializes in listening, a great skill for a mother to have.
My mother-in-law, Marjean, is a master storyteller, and especially excels at teaching compassion and other values through her stories. She was also an amazing educational advocate, helping her kids with homework, communicating with teachers, and signing them for activities that would help them develop their talents. She also has a talent for logistics and organization, which is a huge help in this motherhood career.
Another one of Jen’s specialties is food:
“I love food. I can incorporate food into any lesson in life. We do so much in the kitchen. My kids have cooking night. I do cooking classes. Some people cringe about that because it’s dirty, and messy and yucky and I love it. I will bake bread with my toddler and let her squish that dough. That’s my zone. I will teach them gardening. I don’t care if they spill the dirt all over.
Crafting—not my specialty. I have some girls who are total crafters. I will sit down and do it with them because I love them. But a child can spill flour all over and I say, ‘That’s ok, we’ll clean it up.’ But glitter? That throws me off the edge. I’ll let my friends do crafts with my kids and I’ll teach her kids how to cook.”
I’m not much of a crafter either, but I have friends for which that’s a big part of their job description. It’s wonderful! My sister, Hayley Kirkland, happens to be one of those who loves making elaborate and hilarious Halloween costumes for her kids. It’s so liberating to be able to look at other moms’ specialties, appreciate them, and acknowledge that your version of motherhood will never look like that.
Part of finding your specialty is realizing what is not your specialty, like crafting for Jen Brewer. Brooke Romney is the mother of four boys and a fabulous writer. You can find her wisdom at brookeromney.com. Here’s what she had to say about recognizing and accepting your own limitations.
“My ideal mom in my eyes was one who is out throwing the football and taking her son on in basketball—really out and doing. But I’m just not athletic. I was a dancer. But I’m actually really happy being their cheerleader. I love being on the sidelines.”
Step Two: Figure Out What Your Kids Need
Once you’ve narrowed down your priorities and talents, the next step is to figure out what your individual kids need. Darla, of course, has more great wisdom to share on this point.
“I kind of feel like writing your own job description is a contradiction in terms, just because the job description I would’ve written for myself isn’t necessarily the job description that my children gave me. But that is really the beauty and the irony of motherhood—that you don’t really get to choose your children’s likes and dislikes or their trials and challenges or their joys and successes. You kind of take what comes and you adapt.”
Certainly all of us can think of challenging personality quirks in our kids that we never would have chosen, but that have definitely shaped both our day-to-day parenting tasks and our overall objectives. This is especially true when our children face physical or mental health issues. But meeting these needs can help us grow in beautiful ways. Brooke Romney had a great perspective on how challenges she faced with her kids helped her become a better mother.
“Some of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had have just been loving them where they’re at. And sometimes it’s not a very good place and sometimes it’s an awesome, fun, happy place. We went through some tough years with one of my kiddos and we just got really open with all of them and we realized that having the conversation earlier even while you’re going through things is something that is so important. Being the types of parents our children can come to even with something hard or something bad has made it so we’ve held onto our relationships even through some really hard times.”
Two weeks ago, knee-deep in quarantine, I realized that all of us were struggling with some unmet needs. So I made two lists, one with basic needs, and one with other needs and wants and printed a copy out for each child. We sat down and had a little meeting. We talked about how we all need things like food, shelter, sleep, safety, and love and I asked them to evaluate whether they were getting those things. We unanimously agreed that we had food and shelter covered. But sleep needs some improvement, as does safety—fights can get pretty physical in a house with four boys—and of course we can always add more love. We talked about love languages and how they like to love and be loved.
Then I had them go through the second list and identify which were needs and which were wants, and then pick their top five. It was very interesting to see what they picked—some surprised me–and knowing what they prioritize helps me adapt my own priorities. I’ve included these lists in the worksheet that goes with this episode as well.
Getting to know these unique individuals, our children, is the most amazing part of motherhood. I have talked about this a lot in other episodes, like Your Child—a Novel Problem, Raising Seabiscuit. But one of my favorite roles of motherhood is to be an anthropologist and just sit back and watch and try to figure out what makes these kids tick. What frustrates them? What delights them? What do they do when they’re bored?
We get a front seat to their interests and talents, and part of our job can be helping them to develop these talents and passions, or finding someone else who can help them.
Step Three: Logistics
All of these high-level strategies and tactics sound great. But in the reality of the hard work of every day motherhood, these lofty and loving objectives might be the last thing you’re thinking about. In one of my favorite books about motherhood, which also has one of my favorite titles of all time, “All Joy and No Fun,” Jennifer Senior writes, “…the fun parts of raising a kid—whether it’s singing at the top of your lungs or buying your daughter a dress, coaching a soccer game or staying in and baking banana bread—can be overwhelmed by the strains and moment-to-moment chores of the job.”
And there are so many chores—especially when your kids are small and meeting their basic needs is a full-time job. Where do we find the time to actually connect with and champion our kids while teaching them life skills and cultivating their talents?
For this part of writing your job description I want you to think of the actual parenting tasks you do each week. Try to focus on duties that are directly related to parenting and taking care of kids, rather than managing your home (housekeeping, administrative, etc.).
Look at your list and evaluate how much time you’re actually spending actively parenting. During this time, are you doing things that help you actually achieve your goals? Are there some things on your list that you could cut out altogether or find someone else to do, so you can focus on what you actually care about? Instead of beating yourself up if you don’t think you’re spending enough time on your actual parenting goals, just try to choose one thing each day or week that moves you forward.
A great time period to look at as an example is bedtime, because this is a time of active parenting in many households. In a recent interview with my friend KaeCee Reed, we started talking about her bedtime routine and I was floored. Instead of a battleground like bedtime so often is at my house, bedtime with her two small children is something the whole family looks forward to—the best part of their day. Here’s KaeCee:
“After dinner we do jammies or bath, depending on the day, and then we do books with Florence because she’s less that two. We get her to bed by 5:45 pm. Then we spend more one-on-one time with Oliver. We play a game, read three books, and then I tell him a story. Usually the main character is a helicopter who represents Oliver and then we sing him two or three songs and he goes to sleep.”
Amazing. I decided to try to engineer bedtime at my house to be something that we could all look forward to. I realized that I was spending a total of two hours putting my kids to bed each night, from 7-9, sometimes 9:30. Much of that time was spent in misery and frustration, nagging or chasing children, even fighting with them about toothbrushing or pajamas, telling bigger ones to go away while I tended to littler ones. In short, it was a time no one looked forward to. And, surprise, very few of the things I was doing—nagging, yelling, threatening, disciplining, or shooing them away—are on my list of parenting objectives. So we made some changes.
We had already set aside the time from 7-7:30 to gather as a family for religious study and prayer, so that part we could keep. For the remaining hour and a half, I needed to throw out our whole routine and start over. So I thought about what I wanted to happen during that time. I wanted the youngest two to go to bed earlier than the oldest three, to fulfill that basic need of getting enough sleep. I was already spending time with my kids during bedtime, but it was negative time. I wanted to turn this time into positive, connecting time.
Our new schedule isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly more in line with my goals. After our study time, I send the three oldest boys down to the basement for “teen time.” This serves my goal of helping them develop a relationship with each other—and it also gets them out of the way so I can spend one-on-one time with the littles. I gave my seven-year-old the job of helping the four-year-old get his pajamas on and start brushing, and I get my own pajamas on. Then I do a little check on the brushing and snuggle into bed with my youngest son. We sing two or three songs, chat a bit, and then I go into my daughter’s room. This is our only guaranteed girl time of the day, since everyone else in our household is male, so she does my hair while I read to her.
My husband is in charge of making sure teen time ends at 9:00 and that they check their phones in at this time, and then I read to our 10-year-old, who is technically not a teen, but has been a night owl since birth so I let him stay up. It doesn’t always go quite as smoothly as it sounds, but it’s night and day from what it was.
Step Four: Write Your Job Description
The final step, if you want to take it, is to actually write out a job description for yourself. List each of your objectives, then underneath each one, list the specific tasks and responsibilities that help you achieve that goal. You can also list your specific skills in that area. I have a template for this too, in the worksheet.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just pick one objective—whichever one is the most fun or most important to you.
And remember, no job description is complete without a list of the benefits that go along with the job. After all this thinking about the many responsibilities we have as moms, it’s time to think about the perks. For one thing, there’s that amazing feeling when we actually reach some of our objectives. Remember Molly, who loves teaching her children new things. She says,
“One of my favorite things is when I see things click for my children when they’re learning. So when they’re learning to walk, or riding a bike, or when they start reading. Or when they start talking and we can finally understand and communicate. I love seeing that light in their eyes.”
The unquestioning love and trust that these small people give us is another big perk. And then there’s the personal growth we achieve by doing all the hard things involved in motherhood. But mostly, it’s about joy.
The joy of mothering is hard to describe. Going back again to the book “All Joy and No Fun,” Jennifer Senior writes, “That awed, otherworldly feeling you get when your infant looks directly into your eyes for the first time is different from the sense of pride you experience when that same kid, years later, lands a perfect double axel, which in turn is different from the sensation of warmth and belonging that consumes you when your widely dispersed family gathers for Thanksgiving.”
Those feelings are all different, but they can all be described as joy. And if you look for bits of joy in the small moments of motherhood as well as in the big payoff moments, you’ll find a motherlode.
