Mother’s Day: ‘Don’t call us supermoms, offer a cup of coffee instead!’

By Stuti Agarwal

Mother’s Day is here, and my mailbox is flooded with PR mails. One of the mails that earned my chagrin read, “Mothers are the queens of multi-tasking and ensuring adequate work-life balance. But how do they do it all? With the same 24 hours, moms manage to accomplish far more than anyone else with a smile.” Glorifying mothers as queens of multi-tasking with quotes like these only puts undue pressure on them, especially when she is already doing office work, home-schooling, preparing healthy yet tasty meals, policing screen time, working out, all in those 24 hours and yet facing waves of guilt, stress or resignation that comes with not doing any of those things particularly well.The responsibility of researching on the various roadblocks of parenting (breastfeeding or formula feeding, traditional or baby-led weaning, cloth diapering or elimination communication) and taking informed decisions and then executing it is now falling squarely on mothers and yet, it is treated as the new normal since mothers are meant to squeeze in everything in 24 hours with a smile, right?Can we moms please not have those extra wings? Can we stop emphasising on the “sacrifices” that a mom makes (yes Bollywood, I hope you are listening)? Can we be allowed to be lazy and put our feet up for some time? Can we be treated as normal human beings who have their individual needs? Can we be treated as people who are capable of making mistakes and even failing? Can we put our happiness over others sometimes and not expect to be martyrs? We can’t pour from an empty cup you know, and motherhood isn’t the beginning and end for us.Tanya Bisht, who is a parenting content creator and goes by the moniker Tannzymommy, sums it up aptly, “When both parents share an equal legal custody of a child, why aren’t they also supposed to share equal responsibilities of bringing up the child? Why do they give us the term “Supermoms” just to give us the other half of the responsibilities too? Why are mothers supposed to take up more responsibilities and make all sacrifices for their children in order to justify becoming a Supermom? I don’t want to be tagged as one. I want the Dad to be called a Superdad instead by sharing an equal amount of the load.”