Mothers have been exhausted since the beginning of time, but some difficulties are specific to the millennial generation . There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called. Casares, 42, a paediatrician in Portland, Oregon , tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer.
“But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” – who hadn’t picked up when the school called – “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’” In that moment, said Casares, the author of Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You’re Meant to Be, she related to a Taylor Swift lyric: “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve.” It has always been exhausting to be a mother , but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping.
Boomer mums didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it. Generation X mums had to prove that they could do everything men could do – and then come home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were child.
