It’s Time To Kill The Supermom
Supermommery is not sustainable. It’s not tenable. It will only end in despair.
Shopping King Louie, Alena Ozerova | Canva I don’t talk about this much, but I’m a recovering supermom.
I never aspired to be a supermom. I never signed up for the job. But at some point, that’s what people started calling me.
I guess it was meant as a compliment — at least, I initially took it as such. I’d been an overachiever for most of my life and it only made sense that I should continue overachieving at my job while also overachieving at motherhood.
When I returned to work 10 weeks after giving birth to my first child, I did all the things. I made casseroles on the weekend to freeze. I jogged with a stroller. I breastfed and pumped. I went to the farmer’s market on Sundays. I never left the house without nutritious snacks — watermelon cut in triangles, hummus, rice crackers. I left home at 7 a.m., biked 12 miles to work, and returned 11 hours later. I strapped on my baby and set to work on dinner.
It worked. For a time. Sort of.
OK, so my boss seemed bent out of shape that I’d gone and had a baby without asking his permission. He’d been all smiles when I was pregnant, but now there was this other thing in my life that demanded my attention and hindered my potential. It was selfish of me, really, to eject this human from my loins and then leave the office at 5:00 p.m. each day to tend to it. Didn’t I care about our quarterly marketing priorities?
I felt like I cared. I spent more time each week on our marketing priorities than I did on the small human I’d grown inside my body. But apparently, it wasn’t enough. If I was truly serious about my career, my boss and the rest of the working world implied, maybe I should have considered the consequences of procreation.
I told myself it was OK. I still had a good job that paid the bills. I didn’t need to “advance” because people who advanced didn’t leave at 5:00 p.m., and I needed time for all the breastfeeding and the watermelon cutting and the cracker packing and the dinner prepping and the stroller jogging and the casserole freezing.
I hoped I was making it all look effortless. I hoped I was masking my red-faced exertion, the shadows below my eyes. I hoped I was projecting ease and confidence even as my mind raced, and my heart pounded.
I shared a carefully cultivated version of my life on Facebook, and got all the likes, the enthusiastic comments with multiple exclamation marks. I was Doing it All, wasn’t I? And my baby was friggin’ adorable, to boot. Judging from all the accolades, one might think that my most significant accomplishment in life to date was birthing a friggin’ adorable baby.
My partner and I fed her nutritious foods, read to her every night, and made sure she got plenty of outdoor play. Our house was clean and our freezer was stocked.
I was Supermom, and nothing could stand in my way.
I was invincible.
Except not really.
So what did I become, without ever really aspiring to it or signing up for it? What eventually drove me over the brink?
What is a “supermom,” exactly?
As defined by Oxford Languages, she is “an exemplary or exceptional mother, especially one who successfully manages a home and brings up children while also having a full-time job.”
As I slowly started to realize, particularly after birthing another friggin’ adorable baby, supermommery is built on a blatantly defective premise. If you take a minute to unpack this premise, some salient questions emerge. For instance:
- What qualifies a mother as “exemplary” or “exceptional?”
- Why should a woman require superpowers to work and raise children?
- What powers do supermoms actually have?
Let’s address these seldom-asked questions one by one.
What qualifies a mother as “exemplary” or “exceptional?”
There is a “butts in seats” mentality in the workplace that consistently drives me nuts — the assumption that anyone who is investing more time into their job is automatically getting better results.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve applied this same flawed logic to motherhood.
That’s why “exemplary” moms are the ones who find, schedule, organize, and shuttle their children to and from All The Activities. They are the ones who never leave the house without Tupperware containers full of perfectly proportioned snacks. The ones who bathe their children every night.
The Economist reports that “the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012.” This, despite the fact that in the same timeframe, the percentage of working married mothers with young children increased from 37 to 65 percent.
Back in the 1960s, it seems, supermoms weren’t really a thing.
Some people seem to believe that moms themselves drove this trend of increased parental involvement. We put more pressure on ourselves these days, they say. We’re all helicopter moms. No one is forcing us to schedule playdates and pack Tupperware containers.
There is definitely a visible faction of “over-involved” parents, but there are other dots we aren’t connecting. We’re ignoring other societal shifts — the declines in civic participation, the disintegration of physical communities, the death of small towns and the rise of suburbs, the retreat from neighborhoods into isolated homes, and the sharp declines in affordable and accessible childcare.
Parenting used to be something that was done in the context of community, but that is simply no longer the case. There is no sense of collective responsibility, no gaggles of loosely supervised children walking to school or running up and down the street. Even when we’re (barely) able to pay for childcare, it’s exceedingly difficult to find.
Yes, it might be within our power to let our kids go snack-less or to bathe them less frequently. I, for one, have stopped tucking Tupperware containers into my purse for most outings and I’ve come to prefer my children slightly feral.
But the increased number of minutes we spend caring for our children is mostly not by choice. We do it because our childcare system is in crisis and there is no community to help us pick up the slack.
And, most importantly, the extra time we invest in parenting doesn’t make us “exemplary” mothers. In fact, we’re more likely to become exhausted and resentful — worse mothers, worse partners, worse versions of ourselves.
Which brings me to question #2:
Why should a woman need superpowers to work and raise children?
There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about whether or not women can Have It All. Lots of men, and a handful of women, say, “Sure. Women just need to stop complaining, lean in, and try harder.”
Meanwhile, the resounding answer from most women who are trying to Have It All, as captured in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s seminal story in The Atlantic, is: “No, not really.”
Maybe women who have the “right” husbands. Maybe women who can afford to hire around-the-clock help. But most of us, apparently, need superpowers just to work a job and raise children.
It’s widely understood, but rarely openly acknowledged, that standard workplace policies and practices revolve around the needs of men. Men originally made up most of the workforce, and (white) men still make up the vast majority of the People in Charge.
It’s not all that hard to get to the top when you’re working in a system that was designed explicitly around your needs.
It’s especially not that hard when you have a partner who is shouldering the majority of the childcare doing, the childcare finding, and the childcare shuttling. Whether or not this partner also works outside the home, she is still likely to be putting more time into the home and the needs of her children — physically, mentally, and emotionally.
But it is hard — unimaginably hard — when you are the partner who is attempting to scrabble a bare minimum of 40 hours out of a week while also ensuring that your children are cared for and your household needs are met.
Consider this: A Google search of “working mom” yields about 5 million results, while “working dad” yields a little under 500,000. Similarly, a Google search of “supermom” yields nearly 16 million results. A search of “superdad?” Four million, and the first two pages are largely dedicated to a ’70s movie of the same name.
So yes, there’s some chatter around working dads and superdads, particularly as more and more men are starting to actively address gender inequities in their workplaces and partnerships. But generally speaking, it’s still no big deal when men work full-time and have children.
Being a “working mom” on the other hand is a thing. And it apparently requires superpowers.
Which brings me to question #3:
What powers do supermoms actually have?
Short answer: None.
They say we can multitask. They say we require less sleep. They say we can sacrifice our needs for the needs of the family.
But we don’t talk about the trade-offs or the cost. No one can really multitask. Everyone requires a decent night’s sleep. We all have basic needs that must be met.
Supermommery sets impossible standards and denies us our basic needs. It takes the onus off our workplaces and social systems to support us, then places the blame squarely on our shoulders if (and when) we drop a ball.
Meanwhile, the patriarchy hums merrily along, refusing us paid leave, affordable childcare, pay equity, promotions, flexible workweeks, reproductive rights, and even equity in our own homes.
We are not hapless victims, but we are also not superheroes — and nor do most of us want to be. Society pays us lip service, and pretends to celebrate us, but it won’t pick us up when we fall.
And we will all fall. Supermommery is not sustainable. It’s not tenable. It will only end in despair. It’s not a distinction to which any mother should aspire or be held accountable.
It’s time to kill, burn, and bury the supermom once and for all. From her ashes, let’s build a world in which working mothers can just be human.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories on Medium and Substack are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife.