Although motherhood is consistently demanding, each generation faces unique challenges and adopts distinctive coping strategies. Lately, millennial mothers, also known as Generation Y, have been facing specific difficulties. Is motherhood more challenging for Generation Y?
There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr. Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called.
Dr. Casares, 42, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore., tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer. “But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” — who hadn’t picked up when the school called — “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’”
In that moment, said Dr. Casares, the author of “Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You’re Meant to Be,” she related to a Taylor Swift lyric: “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve.”
It has always been exhausting to be a mother, but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping. Boomer moms didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it. Generation X moms had to prove that they could do everything men could do — and then come home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were children of divorce, manifested an ironic detachment from their troubles and were prescribed Prozac to deal.
And then came millennial moms, the women raised on “You go, girl!” in the 1980s and ’90s and who today are in their 30s and early 40s. On average, they enrolled in college in higher numbers than men, married later and delayed having children, sometimes to prioritize careers and other times because — with student debt and less wealth than previous generations — it felt impossible not to.
Still, it seemed like some things had worked out in their favor. Perhaps they could juggle work and motherhood more successfully. Maybe their male partners, if they had them, would be more attuned to gender imbalances at home.
“No one had these hard conversations with us about just how difficult it is to be a parent, have a career and a partner,” said Brandale Mills Cox, 38, the mother to a 4-year-old and a 15-month-old in Silver Spring, Md. “No one really talked about the burden social media plays, where a huge part of what we see of other people’s experiences makes us feel we are lacking as mothers. And no one talks about the real day-to-day, such as the friction between you and your partner regarding how you raise your children.”
Dr. Mills Cox, a professor of communications at Howard University, said she wished that her boomer mother had sat her down for a frank conversation about the moments when “you’ll just want to go into a room and cry.”
The Millennial Mother Midlife Crisis
Lately, some millennial mothers — particularly those who are middle- to upper-middle class — are finding themselves at a crisis point. While many Gen X moms confronted the middle of their lives as children were leaving for college, millennial moms are doing so with much younger children, many more years of mothering ahead of them. Some are struggling to reconcile the vision they had of motherhood with a harsher reality they didn’t feel totally prepared for.
Call it the millennial mother midlife crisis, or M.M.M.C. The hallmark of an M.M.M.C. isn’t going off the grid, à la Rachel Fleishman, the strung-out mother in the novel (and hit streaming TV series) “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” or meeting up with other moms to release primal screams.
After all, rage and angst are out, and wellness, equanimity and mental health are in. For lots of moms, the M.M.M.C. is about maintaining a chipper facade, the appearance of having it together while quietly imploding. If the M.M.M.C. had a mascot, it would be a swan, an animal gliding easily on the surface while paddling furiously beneath the water.
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