You know with everything that’s going on..with so much hatred out there – feels like the world is hating on mums, mums are hating on mums, kids are hating on mums. It’s parent-teen drama but on world wide scale thanks to the world wide web.

There’s so much content out there about mothers and their difficult to manage/control/love kids. There’s so much content by mothers, reaching out as a cry for help, as an offer to help, or just to know we’re not alone in this. And then there are those negative pricks out there who can’t wait to make life difficult for someone else just because they haven’t had things go their way in some way.

As a mom of three, I know and acknowledge the fact that one of my kids was planned – my middle one. My first was a plan that wasn’t executed well – she came on stage earlier than what was anticipated. My third was an unplanned cocky (apologize for the pun) mistake on “someone’s” part. (Not naming names here ‘cause you know how they get when they’re blamed for something that’s absolutely their fault but they don’t want to take responsibility for it).

This is what happened and there’s no going back.

We were offered an option to abort mission on the last one but certain cultural, religious, personal restrictions emotionally stopped us from even considering it let alone pursuing it. Safe to say we did not receive that suggestion very well.

Not regretting that reaction presently, in the way that I would have missed this absolutely funny little man that I have today. He is hilarious and loving and I adore him completely. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the break my partner and I would have finally got now that the older two don’t need us as much as they used to. This would have been our time to finally live, enjoy life, travel, do everything we missed out on, splurge! And yet, here we are starting from scratch with another baby, going through the motions yet again. What can you say? Is life fair? Nah! This is how we grew up, this is what we were taught growing up. Life’s not always fair. But you live with what you’ve got, when you’ve got it. Things will sort itself out eventually and if you believe you’re happy, you will be.

Doesn’t seem to be what kids these days are taught though. Social media is all about revving and ranting, pointing out what everyone is unhappy about.

“What do baristas not like about customers”, “what do they hate making and what hours the customers choose to order at”, “ what are tattoo artists tired of tattooing”, “what are beauty parlour staff tired of seeing and dealing with”!

I worked at a call centre at one point of time in my life. For a couple of years or maybe more (I choose to avoid thinking of those days.lol). I hated some of my customers! I absolutely hated them, especially the guys that made me cry at the end of the call or sometimes right at the start of it – not because they needed to but just because. I’d try to justify their actions, “maybe they had a bad day” or “maybe I called at a bad time”, “It couldn’t have been about me”, or “they’re just mad at the company and needed to vent”. More often than not, it was the last one & I hated it. I hated being yelled at for something that wasn’t directly my fault. I hated being abused and taking it personally. I hated that it affected my self worth. I wasn’t given the training I needed to realise that it wasn’t about me. Some of these people were just plain petty. They would even try to make it about me when it wasn’t, because they were angry.

I worked at a reception for a while after that. I had customers come to me, their breath smelling of cigarettes and years and years of smoking (I didn’t smoke and hated the smell of a cigarette then), with their discoloured decaying teeth. Ugh, the thought! And some of that was when I was pregnant for the first time! I would run to the washroom at the other end of the floor and throw up after every encounter! And yet, I smiled and assisted them not based on who looked the best or who looked or smelled the worst (it was an auto repair shop) or even what car they brought in but on the fact that they were paying customers and needed to be treated with that “required” amount of respect. And if nothing else, they were people, with feelings and a soul and deserved to be treated with respect just for that. I’m not saying that if a cat walked in without a car and keys, I mistreated her. She was treated well too, with maybe a bowl of milk and some bread and a ‘thank you for visiting’ :).

I was an entitled kid once too but without the social network like the one available so easily to everyone these days. Maybe this lack made it easier to understand the need for privacy and respect of an individual no matter what they’re professional, ethical, emotional, mental, cultural, political, moral standing in life. There was a kind of equality that existed before that’s hard to find today. Social media has evened the playing field, and not in a healthy way most times.

I love my kids, all of them! The semi-planned, the planned and the unplanned. I love each of them “uniquely” – a parenting term I recently learned thanks to a friend of mine. Whether I re-post memes of tired, exhausted, frustrated mothers or of happy, contented, in love ones, this is my personal journey.

The village that used to exist before still exists today, with conditions. If we’re ready to give up on this time that we have with these same children that drive us up walls in anger. If we’re ready to send them away to the village, far away from us to be cared for by others. To be able to visit them when we can and be only a visiting part of their life and not a whole. These are some of the conditions that surround our present terms of an existent village.

It sounds enticing in some ways! But one thing that all these voices that are so quick to mum-shame need to know is, all these mothers that are out there, crying and laughing and joking about their children being absolute little s***s and the ruin of our lives are doing everything we can to hold on to them and every little memory they create in our minds with their every little action and word. We’re breaking ourselves so we can do what we do without the village, reaching for a village that we can create in a way that we can still hold our little ones when they close their eyes at night, watch them sleep, kiss them goodnight and pray for another day with them so that they can start working on driving us mad all over again in completely newly imagined ways! This is us! This is mums in the year 2023! You can mum-hate us all you want but you can never hate us worse than we hate ourselves for not being able to do everything we can for the one thing that matters most to us, our position as ‘mother’!