Why Are We All Pretending Motherhood Doesn’t Hurt?
by Simone Mazloumian founder, Eklektik Mama | the community for mothers in Abu Dhabi & the UAE
And what happens when we finally stop.
We’ve all done it.
Smiled and said I’m fine when we were absolutely, spectacularly not fine. At the school gate. In the office. On the phone to our mum. Fine. All good. Yeah, loving it.
We’ve been doing it so long we don’t even notice anymore.
And somehow — somehow — we decided that motherhood was the place to do it most.
I’ve been pregnant five times. Including twins, because apparently I don’t do things by halves. And I can tell you that for a significant chunk of those pregnancies, I was not glowing. I was not blooming. I was mentally unwell, on medication, with a nurse whose job was to make sure I wasn’t a harm to my older kids.
I had no idea that could happen.
So when it happened to me, I assumed I was the only one.
That’s what the silence does.
There’s an unwritten rule in motherhood. Share the cute bits. The milestones. The first steps and the gap-toothed smiles and the holidays that looked good in photos even if the flight nearly finished you. Share the edited version. And in return, everyone around you shares theirs, and you all collectively agree to perform a version of this thing that looks nothing like what’s actually happening behind closed doors at 3am.
We perform it because we were taught to. Because our mothers performed it. Because somewhere along the way the hard parts got quietly removed from the story — and we inherited the version with all the ugly bits cut out.
And the longer you perform something, the more you forget it’s a performance.
So allow me to tell you what we don’t say to each other.
That you might hate being pregnant. That the love isn’t always instant when the baby arrives — sometimes it’s fear, or numbness, or a grief you can’t name for the person you were twenty-four hours ago. That your relationship will take a battering. Not because you stop loving each other but because two people running on no sleep, keeping a tiny human alive, learning everything on the go — they snap. They say things. It’s brutal.
That becoming a mother involves a real loss. The woman you were before. The one with time, with quiet, with a sense of herself that didn’t depend entirely on whether someone else had eaten and slept.
We don’t say these things. And women are suffering in the silence we’ve all agreed to keep.
When a mum thinks her experience is uniquely terrible, she doesn’t reach out. She looks at everyone else apparently managing and decides the problem is her.
So she gets quieter. More isolated. She sits in her doctor’s office and says she’s coping when she is the opposite of coping. She doesn’t ask for flexible working because she can’t admit to anyone at work that she’s drowning. She doesn’t ask for help because the story she’s been sold is that good mothers don’t need it.
This is how postnatal depression goes undiagnosed for months and even years. This is how women disappear into motherhood and don’t come back to themselves for years. This is the cost of the performance.
And it’s not just the woman paying it. Every mother watching her perform pays it too.
There’s a term for mothers who refuse to perform. Who say it out loud — on stages, on podcasts, in Instagram captions at midnight. Who say: this is actually what it’s like.
Scummy mummies.
The name alone tells you everything about how our culture feels about women who tell the truth about motherhood.
I think they’re the bravest women in the room. Because what they’re doing — taking the fear, taking the shame, and holding it up instead of hiding it — is an act of courage that most of us haven’t managed yet. And every time one of them speaks, some mum somewhere exhales for the first time in months and thinks: oh. It’s not just me.
Life changing stuff folks.
So what would actually happen if we all did it?
If we just stopped performing. Said the real thing, to the real person, in the real moment. At the school gate. In the WhatsApp group. Over coffee.
I think the first thing that would happen is someone would say: same.
And then someone else.
Because motherhood breaks your glass house. It takes the version of you that had it mostly together and shatters her open.
But do you know what happens when you hold broken glass up to the light?
It refracts. Splits the light into every colour it was made of all along.
Those shards you’ve been hiding, the ones you’ve been sweeping under the rug, the ones you’ve been too ashamed to show anyone — hold them up. Because in them is every version of you that got cracked open and kept going anyway. The exhausted one. The one who cried in the car. The one who said I’m fine when she wasn’t. The one who loved fiercely and struggled quietly and showed up anyway, every single day, even when showing up was all she had.
That’s a rainbow of a life worth living.
It’s technicolour mamahood. And every single shard of it deserves to be seen.
So hold them up, mamas.
Let’s see your light.
✌🏽
