The Lindsay Clancy murder trial has revealed what a low opinion of motherhood many people have. Clancy pleaded not guilty to murdering her three children, claiming to be merely a depressed woman suffering from a psychosis. Throughout the trial, many women have claimed that such a state is inevitable in the misery of motherhood and are seemingly doing their absolute best to make each other as helplessly unhappy with their work as possible.

Not to sound like a complete broken record, but I believe it really is the darned phones that have led us to this point. Why? Because comparison is the thief of joy.

To our feminism-saturated world, motherhood is nice enough if you can do it while simultaneously doing lots of other “more important” things. Motherhood, they say, is not good enough to alone hold the attention of a high-capacity and intelligent woman.

This mentality only occurs because, despite all the rampant feminism, we still embrace a version of motherhood and homemaking which is shockingly narrow. Popular in the 1950s, this vision of home life has a woman doing nothing but cooking three adequate meals a day, cleaning and tidying, washing dishes, and folding laundry. There’s nothing wrong with these things, but they all can be made mind-numbingly boring if we let them. It seems we need a PR campaign for full-time motherhood that includes a glimpse into the creative license which homemaking offers women.

Homemaking is a hodge-podge of vocations rolled into one. It combines the work of a daycare employee, a cook, a personal shopper, a house cleaner, an interior decorator, and a teacher (if you homeschool). Most of these careers would never be seen as menial if done individually and for a salary. So why do people look down on them in motherhood, and why are so many mothers struggling with the seemingly mundane aspects of their lives?

The answer is a lack of creativity – along with an unhealthy dose of emotional contagion driven by social media. There are a million ways to make money now that don’t involve leaving your children in daycare and commuting to a cubicle in a skyscraper. Part-time, work-from-home jobs can be done flexibly around children’s schedules and a home’s needs. Home kitchens can be used to sell baked goods to a local network of friends or on roadside farm stands. A social media account can hit the algorithm jackpot and generate thousands of dollars in income through brand deals and pay-per-view platform rates. Etsy shops offer a place where handmade goods – from crocheted keychains to pdf patterns – can be sold from the home.

There are also a million ways mothers can and should use their human ingenuity to engage in hobbies that benefit themselves and their families. Quilting, crocheting, embroidery, sewing, cooking, baking, preserving, gardening, hiking, exercising, designing, painting, and a myriad of other hobbies offer limitless possibilities for the creative mind to learn and expand.

Tired of cooking three meals a day every day? Maybe it’s time to shake up the menu and become really, really good at cooking a certain kind of foreign cuisine.

Tired of cleaning your house? Maybe you’re just tired of your house, and it’s time for a beautifying overhaul of decoration and furnishing.

Generally feeling blue? Physical exercise could be the answer. Move your body and watch your fitness and mental health skyrocket. If you’re in a season where workouts are impossible to come by, nature walks and hikes are tremendous exercise and remarkably kid friendly.

None of this is to discount that some seasons in motherhood come with great exhaustion and mundane moments. Frustration with your lot in life is not always fixable by simply taking on another hobby (indeed, sometimes the fix is getting rid of one).

But maintaining your creative muscles takes work, much like our physical muscles. It’s easy to let those muscles atrophy when we are constantly bombarded with a depressing vision for motherhood which acts like the only escape from the mundane is to escape motherhood and homemaking itself.

In reality, homemaking is the vocation which leaves the most room for creativity of any kind, as a mother on X recently described in her depiction of the limitlessness of motherhood she discovered after her quitting her job during her first pregnancy:

I did find I had things I wanted to do so when my babies slept I started a blog that did pretty well back in the day and graduated from a nutrition school and health coached those with diabetes and did some public speaking (to overcome a longtime fear) and later was asked to be a part-time editor of a website. Life got full of a lot of activities that I found interesting and challenging but which suited me, especially the full-time mothering and homeschooling of my own children.

The upkeep of the home and cooking was stuff I just had to learn slowly along the way. …These things aren’t my favorite part of my duties but they’re very gratifying to be able to do well after so much practice. … My husband enjoys his job but admits there are aspects he dislikes. This is pretty normal no matter what we do. The part of our duties that we dislike are good opportunities to remember to be grateful for the most basic things.

There is a wrench in the homemaker’s life today, however, as smartphones continually steal a mother’s attention away from the good and engaging work at hand. They also fill her mind with so much discontent that she fails to see what truly interesting work lies before her. It’s easy to make the life of motherhood boring. It takes some effort to see how to spruce things up. But none of this will be obvious as long as that mother is doomscrolling TikTok videos of women who set up ring lights and tripods to film themselves crying about their lot in motherhood.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Stocksnap