Embracing the Uncertainty of Being a Mom

This article originally appeared in Behavioral Scientist.

It was around 5:00 a.m. when my husband opened the creaky door to the guest room, cradling our five month old. For a few weeks, they’d both been sleeping in the same room, and I’d been stationed across the hall. We hoped our son would wake less frequently if he didn’t smell me and my milk.

Not so much. This was the sixth (or maybe seventh?) time he’d been up that night; I had lost track. It felt like I had just put him back down and soothed myself back to sleep. My body, depleted and aching, refused to move.

As my husband set our son down beside me, I burst into tears. By my rough calculation, I’d slept about four hours that night—one of many such nights that week. I had to start work soon. In those days, newly back from maternity leave, I could barely string a sentence together.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I sobbed into the pillow. Our son gurgled and shrieked, smiling at me and pulling at my hair. The emotional dissonance made me cry even harder. Here was my beautiful baby, excited to be alive and spending time with his mom. And here was his mom, who was losing her shit.

For weeks, the solution to my problem seemed clear. I needed the answer to one essential question: How in the hell do I get my son to sleep through the night? If I could just get the answer to that question, everything would be OK!

In that moment, I was starting to realize the solution was more complicated, and that I had been looking for answers from the wrong people, and in the wrong places.

Can someone just tell me what to do?

For months, I’d been desperate for answers about sleep.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t been searching for them. The problem was the answers I found weren’t working. Did I just need to wait out this period until things got better, or was it simply that I hadn’t yet found the video, social media post, online course, or blog that contained the magic solution? It was tempting to think that if I just clicked on one more influencer post purporting to contain the five key secrets to baby sleep, or another one promising that if I do these three things my baby will sleep 12 hours a night, or yet another calling me out for perpetuating these four terrible habits that are preventing my baby from sleeping...then, finally I’d have the answer.

Not only were these one-size-fits-all, often unscientific, insights not working for our family, they were making me feel even worse. And yet, glassy-eyed and anxious, I found myself continuing to scroll as I daydreamed about absconding to a dark, cool hotel room for a night of sleep.

Now might be the right time to mention to you that I had also just written a book called How to Fall in Love With Questions, all about how to have a different, and better, relationship to uncertainty. Part of it focuses on how certain mom-influencers exploit followers during the highly uncertain and vulnerable period of becoming a mom. In the book, I call these guru-influencer types the Charlatans of Certainty, and define them as people who manipulate others into believing that the Charlatans have all the answers to their (sometimes unanswerable) questions.

I was falling into the same influencer content trap that I’d written about: The more fast, easy answers I consumed, the worse I felt, and the further away I felt from having clarity about how to navigate the ever-present uncertainty of motherhood.

How did I get there? How could I get out?

The drive for certainty

Sure, part of the problem was the Charlatans of Certainty and the way social media platform algorithms were designed to keep us coming back for more glittering content.

But there were also larger cultural forces at play creating demand for it.

Though uncertainty is a feature of life, the transition into motherhood can be particularly unsettling because of cultural myths that fashion mothers as magical creatures who know all of the answers.

Before welcoming a child, “we think we know who a Mother is—someone who delights in being self-sacrificial, who always knows the right answer, who comforts and nourishes,” Sara Petersen, author of Mominfluenced, a book about the history and impact of social media mom influencers, told me in an interview for my book. “Once we undergo that transition, it makes sense that we imagine we’re going to have a Cinderella moment, where we go from being a human person full of doubts, to being an otherworldly being that so much of our culture tells us that mothers are.”

When Petersen herself became a mom, she “thought motherhood would be fulfilling in all ways, that it would eradicate inner self-doubt and insecurities,” she recalls. “It did not do those things. If anything, it exacerbated them.” As she started to question who she was, and who she wanted to be, the mom influencers stepped in to provide answers—not only to what motherhood might look like via photos of clean, joyful, children; perfectly styled, energetic moms; and serene, clean countertops and unstained upholstery, but also to what mothers did and, fundamentally, what they bought.

“I found myself almost perversely drawn [to these accounts],” Petersen told me. “I was constantly searching for different representations of motherhood I might inhabit to make my experience feel better—I was looking for blueprints for how to be.”

It was a search that felt shameful because of another pervasive, centuries-old myth: that new mothers instinctually, intuitively know how to care for their new babies, that the encyclopedic knowledge of care is uploaded to their brains as a parting gift when the baby is born.

In her book Mother Brain, journalist Chelsea Conaboy uses contemporary neuroscience and historical research to demonstrate that the roots of maternal instinct lie in misogynistic cultural attitudes, not biology. The parental brain does change, but that change takes time, and “is driven as much by experience—by exposure to the powerful stimuli babies provide—as the hormonal shifts of pregnancy and childbirth,” she writes. “The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern—and pernicious—one,” she writes.

The cause, and cost, of trust

With all of the pressure mothers put on ourselves to have the answers, it’s no wonder that we go searching for them from sometimes-dubious sources on social media. But that search has consequences for our health, and quite possibly for our kids’ health.

Ciera Kirkpatrick, an assistant professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, studies how media messages influence individuals’ health outcomes, which stemmed in part from seeing the pervasive influence of social media on her decisions as a mother.

In a 2022 study, she exposed 464 new mothers (with a child three years old or younger) to 20 Instagram posts from what she labeled “mommy influencers” and “everyday mothers.” Half of the posts presented idealized depictions of motherhood, with glossy, made-up mothers, grinning children, and spotless homes. The other half were more realistic portrayals. The mothers exposed to the idealized posts—whether they were created by “mommy influencers” or “everyday mothers”—experienced increased anxiety and envy.

Other research suggests that while mothers are cognizant of wanting to trust only reliable websites for health information, they didn’t express the same concerns about social media. Maybe because the content in those Facebook groups, blogs, and listservs was written by people whom mothers perceived “to be just like me, mothers in our study considered the information and opinions expressed on social media as being trustworthy, perhaps even more trustworthy than those of health care professionals,” write the researchers.

This urge and tendency to trust social media moms is understandable, Jessica Grose told me. Grose is a New York Times opinion writer and author of Screaming on the Inside. For one thing, the sleep deprivation alone is enough to warp anyone’s ability to make decisions and distinguish fact from fiction. “In actual cults, they don’t let you sleep so you’ll become more suggestible,” Grose pointed out. Another factor is social isolation, which may be a challenge for new mothers who live far from family or friends or who don’t have people in their lives whom they trust for parenting advice.

Motherhood, Kirkpatrick told me, “can be very isolating at times” even if you do live near family and community. “You’re likely experiencing a major change to your routine and social life. For instance, you might not be going out with friends and coworkers like you used to, and you might not be going to work like you used to. Just being home and alone with a child all day can be isolating in itself—just because of the changes to your routine. You can feel really alone in your emotional state and the struggles you’re going through.”

Breaking free of the certainty trap

Alone in my emotional state was exactly how I felt as I sobbed in bed at 5:00 a.m. And it was how I’d been feeling even on some days when I did, miraculously, get more sleep.

That was because sleep was only part of my struggle. The sleep question laid bare all sorts of other questions about co-parenting, my identity as a mother, how my own struggles with anxiety could impact my kid. My husband and I had been arguing more frequently as we butted heads on sleep training, screen time, and dividing up care. It was about how anxious and worried I felt hearing other moms talk about their great sleepers, and realizing that this was just the beginning of many years of trying to resist such comparisons.

These questions were uncomfortable, and not answerable on a short timeline—or with the content I could find on social media. What, then, to do about these kinds of questions—the ones that didn’t have fast, easy answers?

It wasn’t until I went on a walk with a new mom I’d met in my town that I remembered a lesson I’d learned from writing my book: Sometimes, what we’re seeking when we search for answers isn’t just the answer to a single question. We’re also motivated by the drive for connection, belonging, community, and meaning. In other words, sometimes we want answers, and sometimes we simply want to feel less alone in the uncertainty we’re facing.

This woman and I were both part of a mother’s club, one where many of the moms had been sharing stories of their babies sleeping through the night. She and I both had babies who could barely make it two hours without waking up. As other moms decried the four-month sleep regression, we laughed about the fact that our babies had never slept well, so there wasn’t much to regress to.

“It’s like we have the same baby!” she said, laughing, as we wound our way through the Northern California redwoods, infants strapped to our chest.

We talked about the exhaustion, the constant stress, the way we’d both started to question our mothering skills, whether we would ever sleep again. For the first time in weeks, I felt a sense of relief, of the coils of my anxiety releasing in my chest.

Neither of us knew how to get our babies to sleep through the night, or how to navigate co-parenting with two exhausted, stressed adults. We didn’t know how to let go of the fallacy that if we just did everything right, our baby would rest peacefully.

But for now, it was enough for us to know we were facing the same messy questions—embedded in the uncertainty of real life rather than the artificially certain world of social media. We didn’t know the answers, but perhaps, eventually, we would uncover them together.