Ho, ho, NO WAY!
Here are some ways moms are putting their foot down, opting out of season of stress and exhaustion
Beth Berry, a mother of four in Asheville, N.C., spent holiday seasons when her girls were young making everything as special as possible. This meant crafting homemade presents, decorating the house, traveling around visiting relatives - and running herself into the ground. “I thought that’s just what good mothers do,” she says.
She would find herself exhausted and worn out every year, unable to enjoy the actual holidays.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, but what about the people tasked with creating the holiday magic? In a 2o21 poll by the University of Michigan, 20 percent of parents acknowledged that holiday stress - the endless to-do lists, planning and expenses surrounding the season - negatively affects their family life, with nearly twice as many mothers rating their stress level as “high” compared with fathers.
“The expectations put on mothers across the board are so high that it’s almost unmanageable,” says Katie Ward, a mother of two children, ages 2 and 5, in New York. On top of school pickups and drop-offs, and running her own business as a portrait photographer, the holidays bring a third shift of additional work, like being a personal shopper for everyone in the family: her kids, in-laws, the cousins. “It all falls on me,” she said. “It feels like there’s a never-ending to-do list on top of the never-ending to-do list that is parenthood,” she says.
Then add to that the guilt of feeling like you’re not doing enough as a mother, she says: “It can be crippling.”
At the core of holiday overwhelming and over-functioning is the expectation of what “good” parents, namely mothers, are expected to do: create pictureperfect memories and rich holiday tra