Therapist Tells Exhausted Stay-At-Home Mom Crying About The Challenges Of Motherhood That She’s Ungrateful — ‘He Works Hard So You Can Stay Home’
The unequal burden on moms and dads is breaking her. But not even her therapist seems to care.
Kaspars Grinvalds / Canva Pro It's not exactly news that even in the most idyllic circumstances, the majority of the burden of parenting falls squarely on moms, even with the most involved of dads in the picture.
But that doesn't mean everyone is sympathetic to how that burden impacts women's lives and mental health. For one mom online, those unsympathetic people even included her therapist.
The therapist called the exhausted stay-at-home mom ungrateful when she broke down about the challenges of motherhood.
Study after study has shown that the burden of parenting has reached levels never really seen before. In fact, in basically every wealthy country other than France, parents now spend twice the time child-rearing than they did 50 years ago, even though exponentially more households have two working parents today.
And even in the most egalitarian marriages, studies also show that the parenting burden falls disproportionately on women. This mom's life is a perfect example.
In a letter she wrote to TikToker Kelley Daring, who chronicles women's stories on her channel, the mom wrote that her husband is "great" and does all he can. But it is simply not enough.
"No one truly prepares you for how emotionally, physically and mentally exhausting motherhood is," the mom wrote, adding that "nobody tells you how high the standards are for moms while fathers get participation trophies."
The mom felt like she was breaking under the unequal parenting workload between herself and her husband.
This mom had a particularly uphill battle as a parent. With an autistic 3-year-old in tow, she and her husband then welcomed their second baby, who was premature, underweight, and needed open heart surgery.
Even without that added stress, though, her story would probably feel familiar to most moms. "No one understands how exhausted, depressed, lonely, and broken I felt for literally a year straight," she said.
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It got to the point where she was so sleep-deprived and stressed she started basically hallucinating, hearing her baby cry when she wasn't actually crying. "The world really doesn't understand what mothers are pushed to," she wrote.
And the contrast between her and her husband's lives couldn't be more stark. Though he works long hours, his work away from home gave him benefits she simply couldn't access. "My husband got the luxury of a quiet 49-minute commute alone each day," she wrote.
"My husband had washroom breaks, time to eat his food in peace. And my husband got to sleep."
But whenever she tried to vent and get support, "no one [understood]" — including her therapist.
Her therapist basically told her she was ungrateful and unappreciative of how hard her husband worked so she could stay home.
When I cried about it to a therapist, I got 'Well, he's working hard so you can stay home,'" she said. "I wasn't allowed to feel without being judged or dismissed, or my feelings invalidated."
"She made me feel like it was unreasonable to be so exhausted," she went on to say. "It didn't feel fair that I couldn't feel my feelings anywhere without being made to feel wrong for it ... I resent that mothers have to be strong and figure it out because there really isn't that much help."
That's not just her perception. A 2023 Pew Research study found that women work far more total hours each week even in egalitarian, dual-income marriages. The contrast is even starker for stay-at-home moms: they work an average of 98 hours a week, which is equivalent to 2.5 full-time jobs.
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Nevertheless, attitudes like this are ubiquitous, even among those who should know better. "I can't believe how many messages I receive from women who describe how their therapist has reacted [similarly]," Daring said after reading this mom's story.
There are no two ways about it: Moms are stretched way too thin, and it is unconscionable that a therapist would tell a mom to be grateful for it.
One thing is for sure: Moms who feel as broken as this woman are absolutely not alone.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.