But where is the joy?

Couch reflections on the missing language of motherhood.

Welcome to Promoted to Mother, a Substack on motherhood, careers and culture. I offer career perspectives to integrate motherhood, question cultural norms impacting mothers and share reflections from my own motherhood journey. Thank you for being here! 🤍

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“Sweetie,” I say with a hint of desperation building in my voice.

“We need to go upstairs now. Mum really needs to use the toilet. Come on, we’ll come back down to the scooter later.”

My daughter stares at me, smelling the desperation building, “No. Scooter,” she responds.

“I know darling, I know we said scooter, but Mum urgently needs to go to the toilet, so we need to go upstairs and then we’ll come back down.”

“No,” she says, staring me down with her 22 months of living power over me.

I say her name firmly, followed by, “PLEASE, mum needs to do a poo now. We need to go up to the apartment.”

Mentally working through how long I might have before my body, recovering from caring for my sick daughter for the past week, has before I have a Bridesmaid moment in our parking garage.

I realise it’s not long enough to do another round of gently communicating, and I start walking intently over to her. In the four strides it takes me to get to her, she sees me coming and prepares to rag doll to the floor in protest.

Anticipating this, I swoop in low to try and pick her up, avoiding her underarm area as she softens out her ability to be picked up. She cries, “No scooter, scooter.”

Trying to move quickly to limit her ability to fling herself out of my arms while I race up four flights of stairs, I’m saying over and over again, “Baby, I know I’m so sorry, Mummy needs to go to the toilet. I’m so sorry, we will come down to get the scooter as soon as I flush the toilet.”

I get to the bathroom, put her down, still apologising as she switches from wailing about the scooter to now howling, “Booooooogieeeeeee. Boogie couch boogie couch.”

“My love, you can have boobie in one moment,” I explain, “See, Mum doesn’t have a nappy on, so I have to go to the potty and then we’ll have boobie.”

The boogie demands continue, and while the bathroom necessity was brief, the whole saga feels like it’s gone on for hours. Each millisecond is accounted for in my thoughts or words to respond to the situation.

I carry her to the couch. We sit down, and I cradle her in my arms – as I have for nearly as many hours as she’s been in this world.

She latches on, and I exhale. Silence. Silence. I look down at her and can see and feel her whole body soften in my arms.

Breastfeeding is the closest thing I’ve seen to a magic pill for nervous system regulation for both mother and baby. In that moment, the world slows down and everyone can breathe. The constant demand of motherhood softens in your cells, even as your body is utilised.

And while there are many moments these days, I feel a tinge of shame for continuing to breastfeed my very tall, not yet two, daughter. It’s these moments where I am flooded with deep gratitude that we both still have access to this magic pill.

I pick up my phone and read this brilliant piece from Ray Katherine Cohen, careful not to let my daughter see me holding my phone. I finish it, relieved to be seen in Ray’s words, and close my eyes.

I’m reminded of a suggestion a naturopath made to me earlier this year: meditation doesn’t need to be a structured approach; it can just be closing my eyes and breathing. I can repeat my Vedic mantra, even if it’s not for 20 minutes. Heck, it can just be sitting without my phone.

As I focus on unfocusing (lol), my body softens more, and I’m suddenly reminded that my shoulders are curling in.

I pull them back, still jarred from words a physio I reluctantly saw a couple of weeks ago, where, in trying to support a shoulder injury, he assessed how hunched I’d become. “Breastfeeding!” I joked, “Sure”, he said, brushing off the cause as inconsequential compared to telling me how every joint in my shoulder works.

Okay. Shoulders back. Mind clear. Take in this moment.

She immediately unlatches, and I feel a tapping of her finger on my other boob. “This boogie,” my daughter instructs.

Ignoring the fact that Karen Millen’s jaw would be well and truly on the floor by now, I switch her over to lengthen the tranquillity.

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My mind runs through the intensity of the morning.

We woke up late. I missed my window to get a coffee before my Husband went to work. There was no coffee in the house. I’m five days into maybe four hours of sleep a night. I’m feeling the hurt.

As I scan back through the morning, shame creeps in – not just about how fixated I was on coffee or getting out of the house – but of how un-present I was with her. How I missed the chance to be present in sitting down, with her in my lap, to read books over and over again.

A familiar spiral kicks in – the thought that everyone else seems more present with her than I am. Our Nanny, my Husband… they are just with her.

While my Husband does his best to integrate other ‘needs’ of what happens when he is with her, beyond just, you know, being with her – it never quite feels the same. The parenting mental load is mine, primarily.

The cruel intrusive thought creeps in: maybe they’re better at mothering, because they can just care – they can just be.

I laugh at myself, but it lingers. What even is the role of a mother? And how is it different from being the primary carer?

Somewhere at the heart of that question is where the confusion of motherhood as a spiritual, biological, and emotional experience – is separated from the work one does in the role as a mother.

We’ve entered our tea party phase and honestly, it’s the best.

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As my daughter starts to wriggle and signal she’s almost finished, another familiar question haunting me recently enters in the last moments of silence – “Where is the joy?”

It’s a question one of my dear friends, currently on her own deep personal journey of preparing herself for the potential journey of motherhood, has asked me.

She’s joked to me, “I’m terrified. Everyone shares how hard it is… But where’s the joy?”

I tell her everyone shares how hard it is now, because no one shared how hard it was before.

“In a way, it’s the new protest for mothers to be able to share their experiences because we want to be seen for the work we do and the value we give to our children and society.”

“But the joy is overwhelming in numerous moments throughout every day,” I reassure her, “and beyond the obvious joyful moments, there is an unexplainable symphony of emotions that don’t seem to have a name, that make life so much brighter than before becoming a mother.”

It’s in those unexplainable, unnamed emotions that can often make it hard to communicate the joy – not because the joyful emotions don’t exist, but because I often feel that we’re still creating the language to share them.

Stories of our modern history as humans are told primarily by men. The wars of men. The losses of men. The triumphs of men. We can describe hardship, anger and pain because men could explain these sentiments in books, long before women were given permission to learn how to read or write.

The hero's journey is a man’s journey, replicating the predictable and replicable nature of their constitutions. So much of what we’ve learnt in language exists because it describes the male experience.

So, where does it leave the experiences of women, of mothers?

Where the hero’s journey instead becomes unique and unpredictable, as wild as the ocean and as calm as nature. That shifts on a rhythm that replicates the moon's variability, instead of the sun’s constant presence?

Where are the stories that were told to remain in our minds, because it was “unladylike” to share them? The stories that were told in whispers in fear of punishment. The stories that were told, and never written, because we weren’t given the privilege of writing for far too long.

In spoken stories now forgotten, did words exist that explained the experiences of mothers?

Did a language fade away, unrecorded, that described how our hearts explode out of our bodies when we bring life into this world? That our cells rewire us anew with a love so indescribable it leaves us in a constant state of awe?

“The joy…” I remind myself.

We share the hard to protest the invisibility of motherhood – to demonstrate the experiences, we at first unknowingly, yet then willingly, undertake to bring life into this world.

We share the hard, because the work is hard – and honestly, because we exist in a culture that made the concept of work, hard. That made us think individualised success, and thus hardship, is more important than shared.

Perhaps we’re afraid of sharing the joy, because we’re afraid of confirming society’s suspicions that motherhood is simply a vacation from the real work? That if we make it seem light and blissful, we’ll be reprimanded for not working hard enough?

But the joy. God, the joy.

The joy drips between each seemingly unspectacular moment. It’s in the smiles, laughs and observations of them making sense of the world around them. All the small moments of simply being and existing in regular life.

And then, when a spectacular moment happens, the joy explodes like a crescendo as you realise how pure and grand life is with this small human you created, as if through a magic spell from your bones.

Even in writing this piece, I realise again how limited my language is to describe the actual feeling. I realise how much easier it is to tell you a story of an argument in a parking garage, than to tell you the story of the fit of laughter my daughter and I found ourselves in, tickling on the couch that afternoon. Or the joy in both of our eyes as she repeats back new words. Or when she, unprompted, comes up to me to simply be closer.

My inner critic pipes up – maybe it’s not about a missing language, maybe it’s just my missing language – my immaturity as a writer. Or maybe I should just be more positive? More optimistic?

As the inner critic builds momentum, I feel my daughter unlatch, but surprisingly, continues to want to be cradled in my arms.

I look down to see her looking up at me, with eyes that can see through me and a gaze, that in reading my mind, looks to want to calm me back to this moment.

She puts her little hand on my chin, gives it a little tap and smiles – as if to say, “Forget knowing the words, Mum, just feel.”

With love,
Kiya

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I’d love to know your perspective – why is it ‘easier’ to share the hard parts of mothering?

Other Motherhood posts you might enjoy:

Mothering the space in between

Before I Forget

The Year I Became Alive