You’re good at everything. Why does motherhood feel so hard?
The Edit · Motherhood · Expectations
You’re good at everything. Why does motherhood feel so hard?
Anna Mathur, Zoe Blaskey and Becky Selbie on what happens when trying harder stops working.
You can manage a team, meet a deadline and remember everybody’s birthday. Then you become a mother, and getting out of the house can undo you. It is tempting to assume the answer is more effort. A better routine. Another book. A stricter version of yourself.
Three DND conversations come back to this problem from different angles. Anna Mathur talks about the standards mothers use to judge themselves. Zoe Blaskey describes the limits of pushing through. Becky Selbie names the instructions that can keep a capable woman stuck.
Anna Mathur: check the standard you’re marking yourself against
Anna describes the guilt of putting her children to bed and promising herself she will do better tomorrow. In her conversation with Simona, she separates having done something wrong from having been tired, stretched or faced with a genuinely difficult situation.
She also talks about taking responsibility after getting something wrong: acknowledging it, apologising and telling children what you need. That is a very different goal from getting through family life without ever being grumpy. The useful question becomes whether the standard allows you to be human.
Zoe Blaskey: effort does not guarantee a predictable day
Zoe describes how familiar habits—working harder, trying to control everything, pushing through—stopped serving her in motherhood. The relationship between effort and results felt different. A carefully planned outing could still come apart because a baby or toddler had other needs.
That matters if competence has always been part of how you understand yourself. A day that refuses to follow your plan can feel like a verdict on you. Zoe’s account gives us another way to read it: the methods that worked in one part of life may need changing in another.
Becky Selbie: listen for the instruction underneath the effort
Becky describes five familiar drivers: being strong, trying hard, being perfect, pleasing others and hurrying up. She explains how these can combine into a loop in which the response to discomfort is to do more and raise the standard again.
Her point is not that high standards are always bad. It is that noticing the instruction gives you a choice about when to follow it. Being capable does not mean every task has to become a test of that capability.
Before you make yourself another plan
Think about one moment this week when you felt you were failing. What happened? What did you expect yourself to do? And what help would have changed the situation? Those are three different questions. Answering only the second can leave you with another task when what you need is support.
The full conversations
Watch Anna Mathur’s interview ↗ · Guest page →
Based on three separate DND interviews. Guest comments are paraphrased; the connections and closing questions are from The Edit.