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The internet loves a woman who fits neatly into a category. The tradwife, basking in the glow of freshly baked sourdough, her life an ode to nostalgic domesticity. The childfree-by-choice woman, sipping Aperol Spritzes on a sunlit balcony, her autonomy celebrated as liberation.
But the working mother, who exists somewhere in the middle? She rarely commands such a romantic narrative. Instead, she’s cast as the emblem of exhaustion: screaming into the ether, and crushed under the weight of challenges both systemic and deeply personal.
These images are rooted in truth. The working mother does carry a heavy load, navigating systems designed for a reality that no longer exists. She balances work, family, and self in a world that too often feels indifferent to her needs. But to focus only on her struggles is to miss an equally vital truth: the joy that comes from holding two worlds in tandem, and finding pleasure and meaning in both.
I love being a working mother. I love my job, which challenges me to think on my feet, exposes me to interesting people, and allows me to collaborate with colleagues who respect and value me. I love my son, who is funny, insightful, and full of curiosity, and with whom I share a bond that feels both profound and utterly unique. And most of all, I love that I get to do both of these things at the same time.
Part of that joy comes from knowing this life wasn’t a given—not for me, nor for many of the women I grew up around. In the lower-middle-class community where I spent my childhood, most mothers stayed at home—not out of ideological conviction, but because they had few other options. My own mother, a working-class woman who didn’t finish high school, never had the chance to chase her dreams, or even the space to imagine what they might be. I grew up internalizing the idea that motherhood required you to set your ambitions aside, at least for a while.
In contrast to the norms I grew up with, I returned to work just five weeks after my son was born, to help put the finishing touches on a play I’d been producing. I continued working part-time during his baby and toddler years, partly because I wanted to and partly because it was all I could afford. My husband and I saw childcare as a joint expense, but with my earnings so modest, it was hard to justify full-time care.
Even so, I never felt guilty about working. I saw my role as a mother not as sacrificing my identity, but as balancing my needs with my son’s. Work gave me a social and intellectual outlet that preserved my sense of self during a transition that might otherwise have felt crushing. Those hours when I wasn’t solely or primarily a mother allowed me to show up more fully—and more generously—when I was.
Motherhood, in turn, transformed how I experienced work. Before my son was born, I often let work consume me, chasing fleeting moments of triumph or agonizing over small failures. But motherhood gave me a new way to navigate the highs and lows of my career. When work felt like too much, I found grounding in the quiet, physical acts of caring for my son. When parenting left me drained, creative work offered space to breathe. More than that, my son’s love showed me a truth I hadn’t fully grasped: that my worth isn’t measured by what I accomplish but by how I show up for those I love.
Motherhood has made me better at my job. Knowing my time is finite, I procrastinate less and prioritize more, working with sharper intent and focusing on what matters most. It also forced me to get serious about earning. Before my son was born, I worked as a full-time writer—work I loved, but which rarely provided financial stability. After he was born, that calculus shifted. Launching my communications agency wasn’t just practical; it was essential, enabling me to contribute equally to our family’s financial well-being and build a professional life aligned with my values.
Even my creative work feels freer now. Motherhood has given me the confidence to write more honestly, less preoccupied with how others might respond—understanding that what people might say about me on the internet has a limited impact on my daily lived reality.
That doesn’t mean my life is perfect, or that I don’t face trade-offs and compromises that everyone has to make, whether they are a mother or not. I still scramble to find a babysitter or rush to cram tasks into a truncated workday when after-school care is canceled on short notice. Every summer, I’m grumbly and exhausted as my husband and I spend hundreds of dollars a week and countless hours shuttling our son back and forth to camp. And while I’m confident in my skills as a parent, I can’t always escape the guilt—like when I let my son play video games for two hours after school instead of one because I’m absorbed in work.
There are times when I envy the freedom of my friends who don’t work for pay and can spontaneously meet for lunch in the middle of the day, or the career strides of my child-free friends. Often—usually on a Tuesday night, while I’m firing off emails for the PTA, or when it takes me weeks to book a medical appointment for myself because the office only answers the phone during work hours—I find myself wondering how anyone manages a 40-hour workweek (considered the bare minimum by American standards) alongside the physical and administrative labor of running a family, engaging in community, and simply being a person with needs and interests of their own.
The ugly truth is that, more than half a century after the second-wave feminist movement, the world still isn’t set up to support working mothers—or mothers of any kind. So much of how our society is structured—from school schedules misaligned with work hours, to workplaces designed for employees free of caregiving responsibilities, to the lack of affordable childcare—fails to account for the realities of modern family life.
But the problem isn’t that women (and increasingly, many men) now balance multiple roles; it’s that our systems haven’t evolved to support this reality. The answer isn’t to retreat into a sanitized vision of the past, where women were confined to one role and denied the chance to live fully in their ambitions and talents. It is to build a society that accommodates the choices women make—whether we work because we want to, or because we have to.
As authors Amanda Montei and Sara Petersen have argued, the role of motherhood writing isn’t to romanticize motherhood. It’s to tell the truth about women’s lives, with all their contradictions and imperfections. And yet, there is another truth that bears repeating: that this way of doing motherhood, that so many of us do today, can be a life rich with joy. Telling these stories matters—not just to inspire younger women and push back against the resurgence of conservative ideologies that claim a woman’s place is in the home, but to reflect the real and multifaceted ways that modern women live and thrive.
Joy isn’t tied to a single path. Working mothers know joy, too—a joy that’s complex, textured, and deeply personal. But this joy isn’t just ours; it belongs to everyone who envisions a world where ambition and care coexist. By telling these stories, we remind ourselves—and the world—that the modern family deserves systems built for the realities of today, not the nostalgia of yesterday. And to me, at least, that’s a vision as worthy of romance as any sunlit balcony or freshly baked loaf.