What is it We Want from Mothers in 2025?

This Mother's Day, I feel fundamentally at a loss

Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

I’ve been inundated with Mother’s Day activation emails this week, as we’re a fortnight shy of that Sunday. Six in ten of all consumers participated in Mother’s Day last year, driving up the national spend by 4.4% to a whopping £1.6 billion (it’s a staggering $33.5 billion in the U.S). From the extent of this largesse, it would be logical to conclude that we love mothers. But honestly? I’m not convinced.

I want to preface this piece with the acknowledgement that patriarchal social structures have always used women, and therefore mothers, as metaphorical punch bags. Equally, what each of us mean by mother is different. Our expectations, our assumptions, our judgements are all defined by an endlessly fractured lens. There is no true collective definition, because we all have/had a mother, and they were all, in essence, entirely different individuals with their own set of standards, morals, traumas and emotional baggage. Mothering styles vary from generation to generation, from city to village from hemisphere to denomination to catchment area. What’s more, so many of the tensions, heartaches and scream-into-the-pillow frustrations are perennial. I remember reading Sylvia Plath’s diaries and thinking, JC nothing changes, does it?

“Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free."

I feel you sista.

In saying all of that, every generation experiences dynamics in a new light. Undercurrents reverse, tectonic plates judder into new positions. In our lifetime, we have witnessed an epoch defining shift with the advent of new media and that’s had a profound impact on nearly everything, not least the institution of motherhood. According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, before social networks exploded, the number of relationships spanning our inner circle to looser ties numbered around 150. Ergo, pre digital dawn, we would only ever encounter around 150 people’s opinion of what idealised motherhood should look like. That was all we could maintain and manage. Unless you were a Hollywood star who became a mother or an otherwise notable woman in public life who dared procreate, the censure would be inherently limited by the opinions of those 150 people. Yes, we had literature and magazines and films and TV building out the cult of motherhood. But in terms of encountering IRL pushback against our choices or navigating influence from others, the chorus used to be modest.

No longer.

Today, someone on a different continent, practising a different religion, living a wildly different lifestyle to you with entirely different children and disparate standards of idealised motherhood can weigh in on something you’ve said or done or chosen as a mother. Can we just take a breath and think about how insane that is.