How To Better Define Motherhood

There’s always been a myth that keeping your house clean is part of motherhood. That as a mother, it is our duty to keep the house clean, laundry, dishes, and chores in the house are all a must do chore. That is definitely not the truth.

How to better define motherhood does not include Housekeeping. It is purely part of any adulthood life for men and women, mothers and fathers, and even children who do chores as well.

Housekeeping Does Not Define Motherhood

It has been brought down from generation after generation that keeping the house cleaned was a women/mother’s job. It was more of an expected thing back in the days. When women were staying home and being the homemakers in the olden days, it was defined as their “job” to maintain the house to be cleaned.

While men were at work working, women were home cooking and cleaning. Well we are in 2021 and that is not how things work around here. Keeping a house cleaned and cooking is NOT a women/mother’s JOB.

It is something we do as “part” of our motherhood roles but housekeeping does not define motherhood. If that was the case, we would end up burnout as in my article How To Tell Motherhood Burnout.

We have so many other roles as women. We would love to see the house cleaned, laundries done all the time, food that’s always ready to eat, and chores done all around the house. That would be an awesome thing for everyone. But in reality, that’s not always the case.

The house will be messy, the dishes will pile up, and you may run out of clean underwear (luckily we catch that before hahaha). And that’s OKAY! As mothers, we can’t always keep everything together and we need to tell ourselves that it is okay. We are not maids and housekeeping is not our number one role.

Duty Does Not Define Motherhood

So many people think of motherhood duties as having to take care of children, cook, and clean. I get so disappointed at how often so many other aspects of motherhood is neglected. People are mistakenly looking for a defined role for motherhood but there really isn’t one. I look at my roles as a mother and see the variety of duties that come with it.

As a mother, I have to focus on things that involve everything about my children. Whether that means feeding, bathing, cooking, cleaning, teaching, educating, playing, and many more other things to do with or for them.

I realize that being a mom takes a lot of work and it’s not just surrounding the house. Yes working around the house is part of being a mother, but it doesn’t define it. My house will be dirty and so will my dishes and laundry but that is okay because my role is not defined by that.

My job is to keep my kids healthy as possible, fed, entertained when needed, and be their mom. It’s being able to take my role as a person/women and incorporate them to being a mother. Why people always assume that motherhood has to be about household chores is a question in itself. Often people don’t know the duties of motherhood, until they become a mom themselves.

Motherhood Defined

No one can define anyone’s duties unless they themselves are in that position. Even then, it’s hard to define what you’re made to be doing as well. I would highly recommend to people to stop jumping to the conclusion of a defined role and to be more alert.

I, for one, will not allow anyone to define my motherhood through a single aspect of a duty. We as mother’s do everything as a whole that involve our families, children, and our lives. Therefore, no single word/duty can define motherhood. It is the range of various jobs within the role that defines it.

SAHM/WAHM

Just because you are a stay at home mom (SAHM) or a work at home mom (WAHM), doesn’t define your role to only dealing with mom issues. The house needs to be taken care of as well as the work for the moms who work.

Being home doesn’t mean that you’re home doing nothing. Any one that thinks so, has an issue. These moms are hard working, if not harder working moms, as much as, moms who physically go to work.

There are a lot of work around the house that are constantly over looked and these are the moms who have to attend to them the most.

So before you think about defining a motherhood role, please be careful at what you say or how you say it. Don’t judge.