Modern Motherhood, Individuation and a Village

This morning I dropped my son off at work experience at a local produce farm. It’s the kind of warm morning where you drive with the windows down by choice.

While I was there, I bumped into another mum from school. Our boys are in the same class. We don’t know each other deeply, but we know enough. I sat in my car, removed my headphones and rolled my window down. She leaned in on one arm, cradling her fresh fruit and vegetables from the roadside stall in the other. Some of which had been picked by my son only the day before.

I felt like the main character in a feel-good film. We exchanged nearly identical to-do lists: making dog food, maybe getting in some gardening as “me” time.

I enjoyed it. It was one of those wholesome moments. One of those why would you want anything else moments.

And then I drove home. And somewhere between that warmth of the day and my front door, the hesitation of the unknown creep in.

Stopping at the local HJs to collect my free coffee I wondered, what exactly was I going to do with my day?

Wash clothes? Do the gardening? Paint?

Or sit down and apply for another job?

That question followed me inside.

But who am I, within all of this?

I’ve been a mother for 21 years. And I’ve spent a lot of that time trying to work out who I am inside it - not separate from it, but within it.

Because what choice do I have?

There’s something like a centre point in each of us. An archetype. Right now, I’m the mother. And spinning around that center are these oscillating ideologies and beliefs and identities trying to form around it.

Depending on where you are in life, you pull from that centre spot, and it shapes how you choose to express yourself.

The Maiden- creativity, curiosity, beginnings, identity still forming.

The Mother- nurturing, holding and letting go, creating exactly the right conditions for others to grow. Or at least attempting to.

The Crone - deep inner wisdom, reflection, integration.

Jung described these not as roles we perform, but as patterns we move through. The problem is that modern life doesn’t let us move. Much….Sometimes.

It expects us to occupy all of them at once.

Be curious and productive but be wise and nurturing and financially viable.

..”oh and if you don’t mind, don’t forget to also be a little bit sexy while the washing is still in the drier and dinner is in the slow cooker, and the rates are due.”

The tension in modern motherhood is that we’re expected to hold all of these simultaneously rather than move through them naturally.

We don’t get to be in a phase. I feel rushed.

What do you mean I have to be everything at once.

Nurturer and bread winner?

Village and individual?

Who am I?

The rush we’re told we want

Society tells us to find our purpose, our destiny. But if you’re a woman over 50… forget it.

At the core of these ideas is something very capitalistic.

-Produce.

-Contribute.

-Grow.

Pay for your survival.

I feel that this contradicts the natural phases we move through as human beings, especially as mothers. And maybe it’s me thats got this all wrong.

It becomes easy to rush.

I don’t want to rush the mother stage. But I do.

I’ve had a hard time reconciling the lessons of the past five years of homeschooling with this new reality, especially since my children started high school and my 21-year-old moved out.

You’re led to believe they’ll need you less when they get older, but they don’t. They just need you differently. It almost requires more presence. Their lives become complex. They’re navigating a modern world I know I never could have survived, on top of regular teen and young adult life. Your responses matter even more. Your language, your demeanour, the push and pull of negotiating life with people who are almost fully formed.

The paradox nobody resolves

When we become mothers, we absorb everything. We narrow ourselves at first. And some of us start to believe that being the mother is all we are. And then the world tells us that isn’t enough. That we also need to be financially productive, visibly contributing, justifying our existence in dollar terms. But we don’t get paid to be mothers, even as interest rates rise and inflation creates a culture that begs at my feet to bend. To succumb.

Modern society doesn’t value motherhood.

It pretends it does. so we have to rush the mother, because really, we realistically need three incomes to survive well, and good ones at that.

And that creates a paradox that no amount of personal growth, acceptance or money or presence actually resolves.

Research consistently shows that parental stress, work-family conflicts, and reduced connection time are linked to emotional and behavioural challenges in kids. Australian studies have tracked how financial stress and housing instability affect children’s mental health, not just the reality of financial strain, but even just the ideal of it creates negative effects.

So we’re told to be present. And told to earn. And when the two collide, we’re handed a self-help book and told to work on our morning routine. Eat better. Take this pill. As though the problem is us, not the system that won’t bend.

We homeschooled our kids. We chose presence, both of us trying to maintain a life and a mortgage on self-employment incomes. We were at home a lot, but it meant intense financial instability that we’re still paying for, literally. Now my husband works a full time 9-5er again, that stress remains, and on top of that there’s a quiet expectation that I should too. I knew when I saw an almost immediate reduction to my parenting payment within weeks of my homeschooled kids returning to the education system. Like they believed that my mothering was done.

We didn’t send them back so I could earn.

We sent them back so they could learn.

At the moment I don’t earn, because it’s hard to find something meaningful that genuinely supports mothers who can’t live outside their own alignment.

The village, and who holds it together

What I have learnt is that once kids go to school, the visible and financial support for mothers drops away.

But the role hasn’t changed.

It’s just a bit less visible. Less documentable. Less fundable.

Despite all of this, and I say this with full awareness of how it sounds, this past month alone I’ve applied for more jobs than I have in years. Which is either growth or desperation, and I’m genuinely not sure it matters which.

Truth be told. I didn’t drive with my car window down by choice, my air conditioner is broken. I have a neurologist appointment in July. Kids’ birthdays coming up. Christmas after that.

And I really want mulch.

And so the temptation is to hurry motherhood. To rush toward the Crone with open arms to be free of the responsibility I chose, to wish my life away essentially because the alternative feels like giving up my values. Choosing income over presence.

I did not set the economy.

Why must we pay for it with humanity.

Who is going to be the village for my kids when I can’t be it?

That’s the question nobody seems to have an answer for. The person holding everything together is also a person. One who gets sick, gets tired, has appointments of her own and forms to fill in and messages from old friends she’ll get to one day, and a future she’s quietly anxious about. One that also has no superannuation.

The system that asks her to be the village has no contingency for when the village needs her back.

I recently told my husband that I’ve judged myself more than I should for not doing it all. Called myself lazy. A brat. Damaged somehow.

But I realise more often these days that I’m not sure pushing back against a system that asks you to compromise your presence is laziness. It’s a choice. A considered one. One that comes with real sacrifices.

What we’ve normalised that isn’t working

I don’t want to invalidate working mothers, hats off, genuinely. I’d die doing that full time work mum life But this isn’t about that. It’s about the fact that we’ve collectively normalised something that clearly isn’t working, and our kids are telling us so. Through their anxiety, their quiet disconnection, the epidemic of children who feel unseen unless attached to a screen.

We built a system where presence and survival are in a wrestling match in jelly. And then we are surprised when families can’t or don’t want to hold it together like that.

If the system won’t bend, and I won’t bend, where does that leave me?

I can’t answer it or solve it.

Maybe there is no answer. I asked ChatGPT and Claude and they couldn’t help me either.

I will own my own contradictions: I can be filing job applications in the morning or not gardening and still be the person my kids come to at night. That I can have a neurologist appointment in July and Christmas to organise and a superannuation balance that makes me wince, and still be doing something that counts, that is valued.

I can also find moments like standing at a farm stall with a woman I half-know, or sitting on a deck in the sun with my kids and their friends on the same afternoon.

Moments where nothing needs to be resolved.

So maybe we just hold both truths.

That money matters. And presence matters.

But I and you are not the problem.

The “system” is.

I am not lazy.

Or a brat.

I am the mother.