"What Do You Do All Day?" and Other Things People Say to Mothers
If you stay home with your kids, someone will eventually ask what you do all day. They will ask it pleasantly, at a birthday party, holding a paper plate with just enough hurry in their movements to convey how busy they are. If your youngest is in school, the question picks up an extra word and becomes what do you do all day now. Someone else will tell you that what you're doing is so sweet, in the tone people use for a child's lemonade stand, and somewhere online a stranger will explain that you aren't contributing to the economy or your household or feminism, depending on the stranger.
If you work, you hear about the eighteen summers, mama. They're only little once, mama. You'll never get this time back. Couldn't you go part time? Who has the baby while you're here? (A question rarely asked of anyone else in the meeting.)
Both women drive home rehearsing a defense that nobody technically asked for. Mine happened on the drive back from a painfully overstimulating fifth birthday party, the kind where I'd muffled the undercurrent of sheer stress with a pitch much higher than my usual tone. I kept replaying one sentence that was said to me by a well-intentioned mom in athleisure. "I bet you are so spent after listening to people's stories in therapy all day that you have nothing left to give." She said it in some mixture of being impressed and delivering a cautionary tale, while she passed me a stack of dinosaur-stamped napkins for the table of loud five-year-olds with elbows in their pizza. All I heard was: you chose your career over your kids, didn't you? All I heard were the sirens of fear that I'd somehow already caused damage, and it was too late to undo it. I took the napkins, smiled, and said, "Sometimes it's a lot." I wanted to cry. The whole drive home I pleaded my case to dinosaur-napkin mom: I like my job. My work is important. I'm doing my best. I'm present. Please tell me you see I'm present. Oh god, did she see something I didn't?
A test with no right answer
There is no way to do motherhood that people won't comment on. Home full time, work full time, part time, night shift, the patchwork of all four that most families actually live in: each one comes with its own script of concern. A standard that finds fault with every possible choice was never really measuring mothers, and it helps to see that before taking any single comment to heart. We've written before about how that standard lands inside high-achieving women The Best Mom Is a Contradiction.
What the feed does with your attention
A generation ago, the audience for any one woman's mothering was small and lived nearby: a relative, a pediatrician, a neighbor with thoughts. The audience now is enormous and it never goes to bed.
Social platforms are built to keep you looking, and they learn from what you look at. They register what you like, and they also register where you slow down. If you linger on the video that made your stomach drop (the one where a stranger lists the ways daycare harms children, or the ways stay-at-home mothers waste their degrees), the system reads the lingering as interest and brings you another, with no way of knowing that the pause was pain. So the mother who already doubts herself is served a steady supply of doubt, and the mother looking for reassurance is served reassurance until everyone on her screen agrees with her completely. It ends up being criticism on one side and applause on the other, with very little in between. That's odd, since in between is where almost all actual mothering happens.
Fulfillment looks different on different women
There are two jobs tangled together in the phrase "doing motherhood well." One is supporting your kids. The other is supporting the woman doing the mothering, and that second job tends to get treated as optional.
Some women are deeply fulfilled by being home. It makes them more engaged with their community, more present, more themselves, and their kids get a mother who is lit up by her days. Other women get that same charge from work, from building and climbing and achieving, or from volunteering, or from making something, and when those women walk in the door at six their kids get a mother who has had a day that fed her. Neither of these outranks the other, and plenty of women never get to choose between them. Some work because the rent requires it, and some stay home because childcare would cost more than they'd earn, and nobody asked either of them what would fulfill her. For those women the question gets smaller and more practical: inside the arrangement you have, where is the part of the week that feeds you, and who is helping you protect it?
Where there is a choice, the arrangement that tends to go badly is the one made to satisfy someone else's idea of a good mother. That's the woman at home who aches to be elsewhere because she was told good mothers stay, or the woman at her desk who aches to be home because she was told serious women don't leave. Children are perceptive, and they can usually tell a mother who is present from one who is performing presence. There are a million ways to do motherhood, and so many of them are good.
I don't think being a therapist makes me a better mother than any other arrangement would. But it does mean my daughters get a mother who is genuinely absorbed by what she does. Some nights, it also means they get one with nothing left to give by bedtime. Both are true at once. I'd rather they grow up watching the real version of that trade-off than a performance of a woman who has it balanced.
Choosing who you let speak into your life
The opinions themselves aren't going anywhere, but you have more say than it seems over which ones reach you.
Notice what hurts. If an account reliably leaves you feeling smaller, take that seriously and unfollow or block it. You don't owe a stranger your evening.
Mute generously. Most platforms let you mute someone without unfollowing, and the person is never notified. This works well for the friend from college whose posts about her choices somehow always read like a referendum on yours. You can love her and also not see her stories.
Watch your own lingering. What shows up in your feed is partly a record of where you've been pausing, so if it's full of things that frighten or shame you, scrolling past them on purpose for a week or two will start to change what you're shown.
Keep a short list of people whose opinion counts. These are people who know your actual kids, your actual finances, your actual household and temperament, and who tell you the truth while being on your side. For most of us that list has four or five names on it, and none of them are in a comment section.
When you can't hear yourself anymore
All of this rests on trusting your own read of your own family, and sometimes that trust wears out. Enough conflicting input, enough broken sleep, and enough years of being corrected can bring a woman to a point where she no longer knows what she thinks, and every decision has to go out for a poll.
If that's where you are, a useful question is this one: if I can't trust myself right now, who can I trust to help me get that back? For some women that's a therapist. For some it's a faith leader, a mentor, or an older friend who has been through it. The right person helps you rebuild your own judgment, and a good one is working toward the day you need them less.
A lot of therapy for mothers is this work: helping you hear your own answer underneath everyone else's, and then hold onto it at the next birthday party.
Maya Kruger, MA, LCAT, LPC, RDT, PMH-C, CTT3, is the founder and clinical director of Overture Therapy, supporting women through pregnancy, postpartum, and the wider transformation of motherhood in NY, NJ, PA, CT, and DC.