Working mom. Stay-at-home mom. Work-from-home mom. Single mom. Adoptive mom. Step-mom. Co-parenting mom. Crunchy mom. Silky mom. Type-A mom. Type-B mom.
If motherhood had a lunch hour like a high school, at which table would you sit?
The titles we are given as moms, by others, or even more often ourselves, can put us in a box. Labels define who we are, or at least they can appear to. When I think about what kind of mom I am, I have a hard time feeling like I belong to just one of the groups above. I think back to my high school days, when I sat with my soccer teammates every afternoon for 5th-period lunch. It was inevitable. We were bonded by the shared experience of playing the same sport day in and day out. I was a soccer player.
In some ways, motherhood feels like playing the same sport; we all have a common goal of
raising little humans. But if motherhood were a high school lunch hour, it wouldn’t be so easy to take a seat.
I envision myself walking into a room filled with tables, each titled one of the labels above, trying to decide which one I belong to. I am a working mom, working three days a week. So should I take a seat at the “working moms” table? But I also get to go to mom walks and play groups a few times a month. So am I actually more like the “stay-at-home moms” who get to spend their “9-5 time” with their children? I read every ingredient on the food labels and make a lot of snacks from scratch, but I also let my kid eat prepackaged foods when it is convenient for us. I feel like I could fit a little part of my motherhood experience in almost every seat in the cafeteria.
In high school, my identity felt minimized to the sport I played; thinking back, though, I was other things too. I was a student, a daughter, a friend, but the thing that defined me and determined where I sat was the most unique part of my identity. Only about 20 of us played girls’ soccer, so in that cafeteria, I was a soccer player. Whereas in motherhood, the most unique thing about me is not what type of mom I am; it is whose mom I am.
His mom. Her mom. Their mom.
I often wrestle with the thought that I don’t clearly belong at any of the “motherhood tables.” I am working toward understanding that this is okay, though, because motherhood isn’t high school, and no matter how hard I try to label my motherhood, the only label that will ever truly define this part of me is “his mom.”
