As the end of the year draws closer, my social media feeds are saturated with people reflecting on their biggest achievements of 2024.
Major promotions at work, climbing a mountain or backpacking around an entire continent alone; finally getting fit, buying a house or reading a hundred books, have all featured.
Each caption talks of a goal finally ticked off the bucket list, something major and notable, of course accompanied by a smiling picture.
But when I was recently asked to reflect on my own biggest achievement of the year for a magazine article, I was stumped.
Not because I didn’t know what my biggest achievement was – I knew exactly what it was, and wanted to say.
I wanted to talk about giving birth without pain relief because there was no time for the epidural that I begged the midwife for.
I wanted to say that getting through a rough pregnancy while looking after a toddler and working as a teacher was harder than anything I’ve done before, or how potty training a three-year-old while breastfeeding a six-week-old at the same time requires more complex logistics and sheer graft than any work-related task.
Even getting out of the house with two clean, fed and content children everyday feels like achieving the impossible – and don’t get me started on bedtime.
But I didn’t say any of this.
Motherhood is the hardest thing I’ve ever done – yet why do I still feel like it doesn’t constitute a real achievement in the eyes of a society that continues to look the other way?
Because experience over the last three years has told me that motherhood is a bit like making sausages – people don’t really want to know about the unglamorous work involved in making it happen, they just like to enjoy the result.
But more than that, in our fast-paced, goals-driven, capitalist world, things like how you finally got your toddler to eat vegetables or even the pain and turmoil of carrying and birthing a baby become irrelevant and insignificant beside earning more money or buying more consumer goods.
The work of motherhood may build the foundations of a young person’s entire life but it is unpaid, therefore invisible, uninteresting and above all never enough.
Social media has shown me that women who talk about motherhood as an achievement are seen as cringe and overly sentimental, lacking a life or identity of their own and even as anti-feminists giving into patriarchal traditions that society says we should have left behind by now.
I’ve seen it myself in the workplace.
I returned from my first maternity leave bursting with stories about how my child adorably mispronounces a certain word and my anxieties about how he’d settle into nursery, but I soon realised that there’s an unspoken culture to not speak about kids too much at work.
All working mothers know the impossible demand placed on us to work like we don’t have children and mother like we don’t have work – and to never, ever give the impression that we are ‘just’ a mum.
A previous boss even told me I need to stop putting home before work because I’d had a few days off to look after my child when he was sick.
It’s as though mothers should not only do everything, but we should do it in the shadows so we never inconvenience anyone else. And to top it all off, we should make sure we have other ambitions and goals because simply being a mother isn’t enough for society.
Of course, for our own well-being, mothers need things outside of motherhood to feel more like ourselves again – for some women, that’ll be a high-flying profession, for some that will mean a morning to themselves sipping a hot coffee and reading a book.
But the need to prove ourselves as worthy, well-rounded people a matter of weeks after giving birth is ultimately rooted in the fact that we don’t value how hard motherhood is to begin with.
The mental strength needed to provide round the clock care, entertainment and safety for two children is far more gruelling than even my most demanding working day.
I know from speaking to my friends who also have children – especially those who have spent the last year on maternity leave or career breaks – that this means it can feel like 2024 has passed us by without doing anything noteworthy enough.
But it’s ironic we feel this most at the festive period.
Look around us. This time of year revolves around the unpaid, unseen labour of mothers.
From buying Christmas presents just for an old man with a beard to get all the credit to whipping up costumes for a nativity at a day’s notice.
Where would we be without the very work that we overlook in favour of shinier, more compelling achievements?
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Maybe we can’t summarise the relentless mundanities and joys involved in looking after a child for a year in a neat Instagram square.
We might not be able to chunk up all that 24/7 labour into defined goals and achievements with measurable outcomes.
But that doesn’t mean the achievements of motherhood are worth any less.
And to all the mothers reading this – you are enough.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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