The Mum Myth and the Marriage Fantasy
When I was younger, I thought my mum knew everything. She always had a clean house, made sure we were fed, kept the bills paid and managed to do it all while pretending she wasn’t completely overwhelmed. She made it look like motherhood was her calling. Like it was a role she stepped into naturally, with grace and quiet strength. But now that I’m older, I see her differently. She wasn’t born The Mum™. She was made into her. Sculpted by a world that told her she needed a husband, a ring, and a family to be worth anything.
So many of us are only just beginning to see our mothers not as the matriarchs they became, but as the teenage girls they once were. Girls who were fed a fantasy, not a future. They were told that marriage would fix everything. That a baby in their arms would fill the void. That being chosen was the prize, and that sacrifice was the cost of love. No one asked what they wanted. No one encouraged them to wait, to study, to travel, to dream.
My mum got married for the first time at 19. Nineteen. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like. She was in a foreign country, trapped in a marriage that wasn’t safe or kind. The kind of situation you wouldn’t wish on anyone, let alone someone barely out of school. Thank the heavens she didn’t have children then. She got to live some life before becoming a mum at 27 with my Dad, her second husband. But how many of her high school friends weren’t so lucky? And if I’m being honest, how many of mine ended up in the exact same cycle?
Teenage Brides and Exhausted Mothers
There’s this strange silence when it comes to teen marriages. As if the world agreed not to talk about how absurd it is to expect a teenager to know who they want to spend their entire life with. To cook for, clean up after, emotionally support, and often financially depend on a man when you’re barely even allowed to rent a car (or even drink alcohol in some places). And yet for our mums, that was just how things were. There was no question of waiting. No space to grow. No time to figure themselves out.
They were made wives before they were women. They were tasked with managing homes and raising children before they even got to experience who they were outside of someone else’s expectations. It wasn’t that they were unprepared because they were careless or naive. They were unprepared because no one prepared them. The world pushed them into roles before they even had a chance to ask what they wanted for themselves.
We wonder now why so many mums ended up bitter. Why they seemed perpetually tired, slightly angry, and emotionally absent. It wasn’t because they were broken. It was because they were exhausted. Their dreams were buried under the weight of responsibility. They gave up their chance to become someone for the sake of raising everyone else. And now, decades later, we’re the ones unpacking that grief.
The System Failed Them First
It’s easy to blame individuals for their choices, but harder to recognise the system that shaped those choices. Our mums weren’t given proper sex education. They weren’t taught about boundaries, or mental health, or financial independence. They weren’t taught to dream of careers or lives outside the home. Instead, they were taught to be good girls, good wives, and good mothers. Obedient. Modest. Quietly strong. It’s no wonder so many were married off quickly, before they’d even had a moment to breathe.
When I think about the cracks I started to see in my own mum, I don’t see failure anymore. I see signs of survival. I see a woman who did the best she could with the tools she was given, even when those tools were blunt and broken. And I see someone who carried her pain quietly, because she was never told she could put it down. The rage, the sadness, the worn-out silence at the end of a long day – it all makes sense now.
This isn’t about blaming our mums. It’s about freeing them. Freeing them from the shame they were saddled with. From the idea that if they didn’t parent perfectly, or keep the house immaculate, or smile through the struggle, then they were somehow not good enough. We’re only just now learning to say it: the world failed them first. And now we’re left trying to heal what they weren’t allowed to.
A Different Kind of Motherhood
These days, we get to live a little before settling down. We get to go to uni, travel, start businesses, change our minds. We have the language to talk about trauma and burnout and boundaries. And unlike our mothers, we get to question whether we even want to get married or have kids. And still, so many of us feel guilty for not doing it all. For not becoming Mum by a certain age. For wanting something different.
I think a lot about how different things might have been if our mums had that same space. If they had been encouraged to discover who they were before being told to sacrifice that identity for the sake of a man or a child. What kind of world would it be if women were allowed to come into themselves fully before being asked to pour that self into others?
We don’t need to follow the same blueprint. We can honour our mothers by breaking the mould. By asking questions, by choosing slowly and by refusing to settle. Because every time we make a different choice, every time we say no to something that doesn’t serve us, we are showing our mums that it wasn’t their fault. We are showing them that they deserved more, too.
Softness Isn’t Weakness
One of the most radical things we can do is allow ourselves to be soft. To be unsure. To not have it all figured out. Our mothers were never given that luxury. They had to be strong, all the time. No crying in the bathroom, no days off, no breakdowns. Just strength, strength, strength. But strength without softness turns brittle. And that’s exactly what happened to so many of them.
I look at my own life now and realise how many times I’ve confused control with competence. How often I’ve pushed down my own needs to keep things running smoothly. And I know where I learned it. It wasn’t taught with words, but with action. With watching my mum hold the whole house together while slowly unravelling on the inside.
Maybe the answer isn’t to try harder. Maybe it’s to try differently. To let ourselves be messy., to let ourselves be human. To let ourselves become whole before offering ourselves to anyone else. Our mothers didn’t get that chance. But we can. And in doing so, we offer a little bit of healing backwards through the generations. A soft rebellion, one choice at a time.
They didn’t get self-discovery. They got domesticity, and emotional labour wrapped in a wedding dress and called it love.
Not Their Failure
If you’re reading this and thinking about your own mum, your aunt, your grandmother – take a moment. Think about what they were given, and about what they were denied. Think about how much of their personality, their spark, their ambition might have been lost because the world never made room for it. Not because they weren’t capable, but because they weren’t allowed. How many wild, wonderful women faded into wallpaper before they even had a chance to see who they might become?
The cracks we see in them are not flaws. They’re evidence. Of dreams deferred. Of pressure applied. And of expectations that were never fair to begin with. And the older I get, the more I want to go back in time and whisper to my mum, “You were never meant to carry it all. You were meant to become.”
We can’t change what happened. But we can change how we talk about it. We can change what we carry forward. And maybe the greatest kindness we can offer our mothers is not judgement or pity, but understanding. Compassion. A chance to finally be seen not just as a mum, but as the person who existed long before that title was ever thrust upon her.
You Are Not Entitled to an Answer – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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