The Chronicle

PARENTING IS HARD, NOT A COMPETITIO­N

- LAURA MAZZA

I’ve been a mother who has experience­d loss… and it was hard. I’ve been a mother of one, and it’s hard. A mother of two, it was hard. A mother of three - hard.

A mother of a child with additional needs hard. A mother with her own ill mental health, that was and is still hard. I have been a mother with her own childhood issues. I’ve been a working mother. It was tough. A stay-at-home mother, still tough. Studying mama, you guessed it... tough. Being a mother in a relationsh­ip and live-in co-parent and motherhood was tough.

A single mother, co-parenting; oh boy, hard stuff.

Cosleeping and breastfeed­ing, formula feeding and bed-sharing… tough.

I’ve had vaginal births and a caesarean. And it’s all hard.

Yup, it is hard.

So anytime a mother mentions something is hard, it’s not because she’s discountin­g your experience of hard. She’s not saying your experience is any less. She’s not asking for a competitio­n of who has it harder, she is just sharing her hard.

Hard is hard. Full stop. We need to stop ranking life’s ‘hard’. It won’t make us feel better, just someone else worse or invalidate­d. So instead, let’s build each other up.

Support each other.

Let her speak her truth without comparing. Let her vent without telling her how easy she has it compared to X Y Z… You don’t know if she’s lived that hard, too, and this is her journey now.

Your story matters. Your truth, matters. Your struggles, your triumphs, they matter. Your hard matters, you matter.

In the comparison game, no one wins. So let’s applaud each other when we win and pick each other up when we are down. Life feels a lot less hard that way.

This post originally appeared on Laura’s Facebook page and was republishe­d on Kidspot with permission.

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