Like My Grandma Did
Both of my grandmothers are still alive - one is 90 years old and the other is 80. My maternal grandma had her first daughter, my mother, at age 16, just after getting married. She proceeded to have three more children, go to nursing school at night, become the director of a nursing home, and then help raise 6 out of 8 of her grandchildren (myself included). She took us to the nursing home home all day while she worked and we played with the residents and meandered the halls. She let us eat whatever we wanted and play outside in the woods for hours on end, never worried about us. We snacked on butter sandwiches and those little colored plastic barrel “juice” boxes, ate a box of cream pies every day, and had no kind of schedule or routine about us - just a fun, uninterrupted childhood of play.
My paternal grandmother married at 22, had SURPRISE TWINS at 23, and by surprise I mean she didn’t know there were two babies until she delivered them; then had to convince her obstetrician that there was another baby inside after she had my uncle (this would have been an unmedicated vaginal delivery as there was no other option at that time), had another baby boy 18 months later, and my dad 6 years later. She became a grandma at 49, and helped raise 6 more children herself. We spent our days at Grandma Griffin’s outside, in the boat on her pond catching turtles, setting up farm stands in her front yard and selling veggies and fruits we picked out of my Papa’s garden, occasionally getting in trouble for selling said turtles. Every summer, when I go back to the Midwest, this is still the first place I want to visit, and the people I want to spend the most time with.
My mom had my sister at 26, an additional surprise pregnancy, and her and my dad welcomed the pregnancy even though they were barely dating. This year they celebrated 36 years together. My mom was working as an accountant at a woodworking plant and after Sarah was born, she took her to work with her there, everyday, 9-5, for the first 6 months of her life. My dad was working night shift at a paper product plant, and they would trade off sleeping. I was born 3 years later; my mom was working in social services and my dad was starting out at the gas company as a meter reader - to this day, he is still there, but instead operates as a large volume account manager - he’s been with the company 30+ years and plans to retire in the next few.
I’m sharing all of this because, as a millennial mom, looking back on all of their lives, I have so many questions. Questions I have asked them all recently as all of this has been weighing heavy on my mind. Things like - when did you know you were ready for another baby? What was your plan for your birth? What type of schooling did you choose for us and why? What motivated you to do ALL THE THINGS and how in the heck did you accomplish all of that?
When, and who, in this world, started making all of this so much harder? Who decided that we needed to put such a heavy weight on every single decision that we make in our children’s lives? That everything in their lives would be divided into a few different camps - from the way we parent (gentle, authoritative, etc.) to the way we educate (homeschool, Montessori, play-based, public, private, hybrid, online), to the way we feed our children?
All of this constant input and decision making is so extremely draining to me. I’ve sat for hours on end, in the depths of the night while feeding my children, rocking them back to sleep, contemplating whether I am “doing things right.” I weigh my options about so many things constantly, from how much healthy food they have eaten in a day to what childcare options are the most appropriate for them and for our families needs. I find it so hard to make a decision about a lot of things in motherhood. And when I really try and dissect the why - the “why” of the “hardness” of being a mom in 2026 - it’s this - the world is taking away our intuition. It’s selling us some new version of motherhood and parenting every day. Every time we open our phones, we see articles about plastic ruining our health and our children’s lies, how co-sleeping is horrible or how sleep training is horrible, how having the proper age gap between your children will make or break your life - is 2 under 2 the key to life or is 4 years apart the perfect age? We don’t make decisions on our own without the input of 75 other people on the internet.
Though I am early in my mothering journey, I personally have suffered from all of this information overload - it’s taken away from me simply learning my children for who they are, letting them have individual needs, and be wildly different from each other. But when I get stuck in a bad headspace and decision overload, I think of the matriarchs of my family, all of the beautiful generations that came before me, and I know they didn’t have all of this extra weight and decision fatigue to take away from this sweet and beautiful time of their lives. They just, well, lived and loved their families. It was all that mattered.
How do we get back to this place? How can we change the outcomes in just a single generation? Can we get back to a place of learning to trust ourselves, our intuition, and to surrender into motherhood? It’s my goal everyday of my life - I just want to live like my grandmothers did and love my babies fiercely while they are still here with me.
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