Say Cheese: The Hidden Labor of Making Motherhood Look Effortless

This is the part of the mental load everyone overlooks

Peter Paul Rubens, Immaculate Conception, 1628

The elevator door slid open to the foyer of my in-laws’ sun-kissed penthouse. Gentle plumes of smoke drifted from the library, tickling my nose. Coats were haphazardly piled atop one another, crowding each available hook—a visual reminder that we were, no doubt, the last to arrive. Only an hour and a half late.

I smoothed down my blazer and took a deep breath from somewhere deep in my abdomen as I marched forward with my double stroller. I was a warrior, emerging from the battlefield to claim my Purple Heart for surviving the deadliest of combat scenarios: the simultaneous post-nap tantrum of a toddler and six-month-old.

We knew we’d be late. A 2:00pm call time for an early Christmas gathering with 20+ out-of-state relatives was simply never going to work. An on-time arrival would require rousing my kids from their afternoon snooze and I would rather attempt to negotiate peace in the Middle East than deprive myself of even a minute of the only peace I would get that day. Still, I’d used the chaos-free hours productively: I got myself dressed, packed diaper bags with extra juice and outfits, and secured gluten and dairy free desserts.

None of that mattered when my two-year-old, Jackson, woke up and chose violence.

At first, we tried the gentle parenting route, offering comfort and time to decompress before attempting to wrestle him into a clean shirt (preferably one without a Spiderman logo) until we finally had to shove the damn thing over his head. “Holy shit. We did it.” I thought as Jackson quieted down. He was barefoot. Kaia’s hair was a bird’s nest mess. But who cared? I certainly didn’t. “I can’t believe we made it out the door.”

I spoke too soon.

The second the wheels of our Uppababy Vista hit the sleek lobby floor, screams erupted from our toddler the likes of which could have echoed from Fifth Avenue to Timbuktu. A mini, red Hulk replaced the sweet, Cheerio-chomping boy who’d sat peacefully in his stroller just moments before. His face turned a crimson shade of red as he tore himself from the stroller’s straps and flung his upper body towards the floor—only to be caught mid-air by my husband, Tom, just before his skull made contact with the tile.

When we finally arrived, I released the beasts into the wild, sending my son off to play with his grandmother and exchanging my daughter for a double-pour glass of red wine with my sister-in-law (bless her).

I applied a fresh coat of lipgloss before slapping a synthetic grin across my face and summoning my best Marcia Brady voice to excitedly say, “Merry Christmas, everyone!!! It’s so great to see you.” Performance mode: activated. “How are you?” Uncle Bobby asked with a cheery smile. “We’re great! The kids are so sweet!” Bullshit.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

By the end of the dinner, I had made enough small talk to kill a Stepford wife, all while mentally cycling through the grocery list, school sign-ups, and teacher gifts I had to secure. I adore my family and they had been an immense help with my kids upon arrival. But I was utterly shattered and relieved to collapse into my bathtub with a Real Housewives episode and, admittedly, more wine.

But what had been more work? Getting my kids to and through the fête or creating the perception that the whole experience had been effortless?

This performance of maternal ease isn't something I invented—it's been centuries in the making. And while conversations about the disproportionate mental load women take on are common place these days, here’s the part we don’t discuss: the work done to create the perception that there is no mental load—the illusion of effortlessness and even, dare I say, perfection.

Let’s face it: women have been conditioned to silence and conceal the realities of womanhood and, specifically, motherhood. From the jump, the chaos of motherhood was forcibly hidden through the performance of composure. In 1563, the Council of Trent, established by the Holy Roman Emperor to restore Catholicism to its prior religious authority and combat criticisms raised by the Reformation, met to codify a set of provisional guidelines that articulated the requirements for illustrations of the Virgin and other female saints.¹ The Council and supplemental artistic authorities dictated that Mary be depicted as youthful, modest, and serene, glowing with long golden hair flowing lightly amidst her halo. Perhaps the most widely revered, viewed, and recreated female icon of the Western world—only second to, quite possibly, Beyonce or Taylor Swift—the Virgin Mary set the foundation for how women were to appear, the Council, having created a literal mandate that women project a façade of ease. But I’d bet your ass that any mother, divine or not, stranded in a desert in 100 degree heat, a newborn in tow, and no air conditioning in sight would tell you that they’d rather be bitten by the snake in the Garden of Eden than to be told to smile more while doing it.

The advent of social media has only further entrenched the societal norms encapsulated by the Virgin Mary, repackaging the centuries old feminist ideal in high-res, heavily filtered pixels. Funny memes and Instagram reels about sleepless newborn nights or terrible twos that even hint at the hard parts of motherhood are muted and even nullified by captions that exclaim, “LOL, just kidding, it’s all worth it!” The prospect of relatability is obscured by photos of newly postpartum mothers aglow in full glam and a fresh blowout, holding their sleeping infants while we all pretend she isn’t freaking out that her breasts are about to explode and leak all over her silk robe.

In all fairness to women guilty of these acts (myself included), social media is a highlight reel that necessitates curation.

Moreover, videos and photos that capture the messiness of maternal life situated above captions that explain how negative feelings about the difficulties of parenthood are mitigated by the immense joy and love mothers feel for their children can actually capture the complexities of motherhood: the paradox of the beautiful mess.

Thus, there is some level of realness in these posts as well as in our day-to-day, real time interactions in which we exclaim, “We’re fine! Everything is great!” and gloss over the vomit, spilled milk, and fact that we haven’t had sex in G-d knows how long. Everything is great—sort of.

Of course, the pressure to behave like everything is perfect with respect to our children is also muddled in with the expectation that our bodies also appear like we never even had said children. “Bounce back” culture espousing tummy tucks, cleanses, breast lifts, and Ozempic runs rampant. Have bags under your eyes? Sephora has a cure for that. Run. Immediately. Lest anyone see you looking as tired as you really are. Boobs so saggy you can roll them into your bra? Better have taken a photo of your breasts engorged to show that plastic surgeon down the road.

The truth is, taking care of the vomit, cleaning up the spilled milk, attempting intimacy with our partners, and running to the gym is a lot of fucking work. So why are we also working overtime to manufacture the impression that it isn’t—that we simply have it all together?

The answer I’ve arrived at is multi-faceted. In addition to the pervasive cultural conditioning through religious and secular iconography from the Virgin Mary to Marcia Brady that equates “goodness” with self-sacrifice and quiet competence, we also have an innate fear of judgment amplified by our use of voyeuristic technology. We fear that if we complain out loud, we may risk being labeled “ungrateful,” “incompetent” or even, “bad moms” unworthy of our children.

Perhaps, what we fear even more than the judgment of others is the self-inflicted criticism we impose on ourselves. As if admitting any failure to keep it all together at any given moment, even to ourselves, is to admit to some deep, personal inadequacy: that if we were somehow more organized, more prepared, more beautiful, it wouldn’t all be so hard.

Or, maybe, faking it till we make it is a necessary act of survival. Perhaps getting into the details of my hellish morning that started at 4:30 AM and ended with me getting hit in the face with a Pokeball is more effort to discuss than simply pushing it to the back of my brain and letting it fester internally. Maybe composure is our armor.

“I had indeed been raised to be perfect, but also not to draw attention to the quest for perfection. Perfection must look effortless.” Amy Griffin, The Tell

But maybe it’s also worth addressing, not just for ourselves but also for our children. In Amy Griffin’s book, The Tell, she recalls a scene in which her young daughter accuses her of being too perfect to be relatable. “You’re nice, but you’re not real,” she says. Oof.

I’m not entirely sure what the answer is moving forward. It may be as simple as agreeing that we all need to give ourselves some goddamn grace. But more likely, the first step is acknowledging that the work isn’t all in the doing or even in the thinking about what has to be done. It’s in pretending that none of it is work at all.

1. Alfonso Rodriguez G. Ceballos “Image and Counter-Reformation in Spain and Spanish America.” In Ronda Kasl (ed.), Sacred Spain: Art and belief in the Spanish world.(Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2009) 6.