Moms, Monsters, Media & Margaritas

By Angela Williams Glenn

Moms, Monsters, Medias & Margaritas examines the perceptions and expectations of motherhood in our 21st Century digital world. Today’s social media world can send today’s mother on a chase of supermom and leave her with moments of doubt and guilt for her choices and abilities. Through a look at the different factors and influences of today’s world on motherhood, Moms, Monsters, Medias & Margaritas will leave you with a humorous and inspirational look at your own motherhood experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781304983701

Book preview

Moms, Monsters, Media & Margaritas

Moms, Monsters,

Media & Margaritas

(A Look at the Perceptions and Expectations of Motherhood in our 21st Century Digital World)

Angela Williams Glenn

Copyright 2014 by Angela Williams Glenn

All right are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. All sources referenced throughout the book are credited in the end on the reference page.

Cover design image by Nathan Glenn at PointClickCapturePhotography.

Editor: Amy Justis

Printed in the United States of America

A & N Publications

Baltimore, Maryland

ISBN 978-1-304-98370-1

Chapter 1

Letting Supermom Go

Social media today has many women, particularly mothers, feeling as if they have to measure up to some superwoman image as today’s modern, post feminist woman. Just as social media is redefining what it’s like to grow up for today’s youth, it’s redefining the expectations of motherhood. As the first generation of mothers with social media shouting today’s expectations at us on a daily basis, we can sometimes find ourselves overwhelmed with those high but unrealistic expectations.

Even though we may feel that society has come to expect a lot out of us mothers, it’s still probably not as much as we expect out of ourselves at times. We intend to measure up to supermom in any way we possibly can. We have brought life into the world and now we are ready to conquer it. At least we thought we were ready until reality came crashing in on our hopeful ideals of motherhood.

All of a sudden, we’re not so worried about conquering the world with our wonderful examples of parenthood and our ideal, perfect children. We hit a point where we forget supermom and just want to survive. We want to conquer that ridiculous amount of laundry that keeps growing and growing because our daughter thinks she’s a princess and needs to wear a different ball gown every hour. We want to conquer that mess of our bedroom that looks worse than our teenage self’s room. We want to conquer those bills that seem a little harder to pay now that those money absorbing things called our children seem to use up every last penny. We want to conquer getting that little independent child of ours to listen and behave. We just want to conquer our sanity!

Society wants us to be superwoman with balancing the kids, the husband, the house, an ambitious career, and probably even some pet project. Even though we may seem a little nuts at times, some days we are superwoman just because we survived! We didn’t misplace our kid for the day, drive the car off a cliff when the children were screaming in the back, or burn the house down while we were trying to do five different things while cooking dinner. Some days these are great accomplishments that deserve celebrating.

As mothers we adore and love our children more than anything else in the world; they are our pride and joy. However, as much as they make us smile in happiness, there's at least a few times a week the idea of playing hide and seek with them and never coming out sounds like a great idea! And maybe never is a little harsh, but at least not until after they’ve gone to bed. They cry, scream, and fight, and sometimes it just makes us want to cry, scream, and start a fight with anyone that's willing to pick a fight with us.

Prior to having kids, keeping up with the house was a piece of cake, but then came the kids. There’s this thing pregnant women refer to as pregnancy brain to reference as their excuse for why they all of a sudden forget things and are absentminded. As any mother knows that doesn’t end after we’ve delivered our baby. That was just the onset of mommy brain. Now we have thousands upon thousands of different things running through our mind like a gerbil on a treadmill. Work, deadlines, kids, playdates, practices, recitals, laundry, dishes, bills, appointments, more laundry, and the list goes on and on. I may not be supermom, but I fit the category of the absentminded, did I totally just forget that mom. I have almost caused kitchen fires while cooking, I have flooded my kitchen with dishwater over three times because I get distracted doing something else while I was supposed to be doing dishes. I’ve had to rewash my clothes numerous times because they sat in the washer for days on end because I kept forgetting them or didn’t have the time to tend to them.

Multitasking becomes an art form during motherhood. As much as our husbands may help, the gift of multitasking seems to be a woman’s talent. But even though it may seem impossible to us, we just make it possible even if we do forget to take care of a few things along the way or let our four year old wash dishes because she was just so excited to help, and it was one less thing on the mother to do list.

On that mother to do list comes the expectations of our husbands. We hope to fulfill the expectations they have of us as not only the mother of their children but as their wife.  We would like to fulfill his fantasy of his drawers all stocked with laundered and folded clothes instead of taking up permanent residency in the laundry basket in different states of dirty, clean but unfolded, and finally folded but never quite put away. We both imagine a life where he’d walk in the door of our imagined spotlessly clean house and dinner would be hot and ready on the table. Sure, we’d like to wear sexy underwear and cute little clothes to bed but bringing sexy back after kids is buried somewhere in our underwear drawer where we traded our sexy girl panties for those so much more comfortable granny panties. Maybe they wish for this cheerful, leaping with joy, smothering him in kisses wife when he walks in the door, but superwife isn’t anymore of a reality than supermom. Hopefully, we’re lucky enough to have a man that just loves us for our attempt at being a good, loving, supportive wife and loves us even when we do switch moods like the switch of a light.

In order to feel successful and meet this so called superwoman mentality that the media at times can make us feel we need to be, we must not only conquer the chaos of our household but our careers too. This is where motherhood starts to feel like it requires more hours in the day. This is where we start to feel like we’re running a marathon as fast as we’ve ever ran in our lives, but we’re in dead last. Being a mother is a full time job by itself and some of us throw a paying job or career on top of it. There are times that grip on our sanity becomes a very thin grip. There are weeks we feel that if we made it through the week without physically harming someone at work, actually made it there close enough to the right time, reasonably dressed in the right clothes, and somewhat stuck to the deadlines, then it should be considered a successful week of work. However, sometimes that survival mode of balancing it all comes with a few small casualties along the way.

We’ve all had those oh, no, why wasn’t I paying attention moments. That’s because we’re so busy conquering everything and trying to be supermom, we sometimes screw up. We are only human after all. It’s just hard to forgive ourselves. We’re rushing to load everyone in the car and smack the door in our kid’s face. Or whoops, we slam one of their fingers in a door, or they grabbed the hot curling iron because it was within their reach. The list of accidents could go on and on, and as mothers we tend to put