I bet you’ve seen them. The memes and the articles about how women — and mothers especially — just can’t win. Go to work: poor kids, I could never leave mine. Don’t work: scrounger, what does she do all day.
Whatever choice you make, someone arrives with another opinion, another standard, another version of wrong.
And they’re right. The world is stacked against us.
But there is another mother in that conversation. The one nobody writes the article about.
She has even more judgment against her — and fewer choices to begin with. Not just hard choices. Choices where every option looks wrong to someone, because she doesn’t have the resources that would make any of them look right.
She can’t win — but it’s worse than that. Whatever she does she is losing, and we judge her for it, when she never had a chance to run the same race to begin with.
There is a mother you might see.
She is at the school gates, or in the waiting room, or in the supermarket. Her children might be loud, or unkempt, or difficult to manage in public. She might look tired. She might look like she has stopped trying.
Perhaps she has. Because whatever she tries, someone will tell her it’s wrong.
Take them to school: that child is disrupting the class, how can you expect a teacher to manage that, shouldn’t be in a mainstream classroom. Keep them home: she’s neglecting their education, who does she think she is, thinking she can do better.
Take them to the supermarket: do we all have to listen to that, someone should have more control, disgraceful behaviour in public. Get the shopping delivered: lazy, denying them experiences, neglecting their development.
Take them to the waiting room: why would you bring a child like that somewhere people are unwell and trying to be calm. Keep them home and miss the appointment: neglectful, should have made it work.
Tell them off in public: hysterical, needs educating about her child’s needs, they can’t help it, bad mother. Don’t tell them off: pushover, no discipline, needs to be a parent not a friend, bad mother.
Every door she tries has a judgment waiting behind it.
Push too hard for a diagnosis and she wants it too much, must be making it up, must be about her. Don’t push hard enough and she should have known better, should have done more, failed her child by not fighting harder.
Go to work: how can she expect anyone else to manage that child, too complex for nursery, too many needs, not the right fit anywhere. Stay home: scrounger, on benefits, should have thought about that before having children.
Don’t claim DLA: selfish, that money is for her child, how could she turn it down. Claim it: scrounger, just wanted a diagnosis so she didn’t have to work.
I saw it play out in an online forum recently. A mother posted saying she was thinking of closing her DLA claim and asking how to do it. Hundreds of comments telling her how selfish she was. That money is for her child. She has no right to turn it down. But scroll elsewhere — and you don’t have to scroll far — and the same mother, claiming the same money, is a scrounger. Gaming the system. Lazy.
Same woman. Same decision. Wrong either way.
Leave a difficult relationship and she’s a single mother, scrounging, couldn’t make it work, should have chosen better. Stay and she’s putting the children through it, should have left sooner.
Notice what is happening here.
We often imagine that judgment helps people make better choices.
But these are not situations where there is a clearly correct choice waiting to be discovered.
These are situations where resources are limited, needs conflict, and every option solves one problem while creating another.
Yet we continue to behave as though there must be a perfect answer — and if a mother cannot find it, the fault must lie with her.
The house is cold because she spent the money on food. The children look unkempt because she spent the money on heating. She looks exhausted because she has been doing all of this alone, and her body is now paying the price — chronic fatigue, chronic illness, the accumulated cost of too much held for too long with nowhere to put it down.
And still the judgments come.
She looks a mess. Where is her self-respect. Poor kids. Should have thought about that before.
We pile more onto her and then judge her for struggling under the weight. We remove options and then judge her for the choices she makes without them. We design a standard that moves every time she gets close to it — and then we act surprised when she can’t reach it.
She was never going to win. The game was not designed for her to win.
We often talk about individual choices as though everyone is choosing from the same menu.
But resources change what is possible.
Time changes what is possible.
Health changes what is possible.
Support changes what is possible.
The mother being judged is often not making a worse choice than everyone else.
She is making the best choice available from a much shorter list.
And if you are her — if you are reading this and recognising yourself in it —
I see you.
I see what you carry and what you give and how much of yourself has gone into keeping everything together. I see the love in the juggling, even when the juggling looks like chaos from the outside.
Someone will tell you the housework can wait. And then someone else will judge you for it, and sometimes there are real consequences to that, and both of those things are true at once and there is no clean answer.
Someone will say look after yourself. But what good is a bubble bath if what you need is sleep, and money, and time.
Someone will say it only takes five minutes. There are 1,440 minutes in a day. Theoretically 288 five-minute tasks. But when there are more tasks than there is time or energy, and they all only take five minutes, and some of them have to be let go of — that is not laziness. That is mathematics.
I don’t have the answer that makes this easier. I wish I did.
But I want you to know that the impossible standard you are failing to meet was always impossible. That was not an accident.
You were never the problem.
You were just the one left holding everything nobody else would.