'This cooling seat wasn't made for me'
Mary Catherine Starr's 'Mom Life' comics take on the universality of the patriarchy, the false promise of flexible work, and the challenges of being the default parent.
Mary Catherine Starr is an illustrator, designer, and yoga teacher whose “Mom Life” comics offer commentary on parenthood, societal expectations, double standards and, famously, who gets to eat the peach without guilt.
Tell me a little bit about yourself, and your work:
I have two kids, who are 6 and 3. I started Mom Life Comics just as a creative outlet for myself before the pandemic, but it really got going during the pandemic. It was a place for me to just share and vent and express some of the frustrations of being a mom, and being the default parent. My goal was to create community around the challenges of marriage, motherhood and overwhelm in general.
What’s been so surprising to me is that I didn’t know how universal these experiences are. Since a comic I made in January went viral in a bunch of different countries, I’m seeing people all over the world who are saying, “We feel the exact same way you do.” I thought my experience was a very United States- middle-class-mother experience, but what I’m seeing is, it doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what language you speak — moms everywhere feel the same way about a lot of these things.
I didn't quite realize how universal these feelings are, of frustration and overwhelm and being alone and really angry and kind of let down by what we thought motherhood would be like. I’m seeing that women all over the world feel this way. So while that’s frustrating that we are all dealing with these things, it’s also affirming to know that you’re not alone. Because then maybe it’s not about my husband, maybe it’s not that something’s wrong with me or with my relationship; maybe it’s about a larger culture.
Maybe it’s not that something’s wrong with me or with my relationship; maybe it’s about a larger culture.
And that’s so powerful, because we don’t have a lot of practice viewing things as societal or structural problems, do we? It’s so easy to just blame ourselves or to think that it’s just something we need to fix.
I have a friend who just got a new car and it has this air conditioning that blows up your butt. It’s, like, cooling her vagina. A guy who’s feeling hot down there might want this AC there, but maybe a woman wouldn’t! It’s a little, small example of how the entire world is built for men and men’s bodies and men’s experiences. A lot of us wouldn’t even think, This cooling seat wasn’t made for me. We think, I just don’t like this. It’s because it’s made for a different body. And so often, we blame ourselves, or think it must just be me.
I think for the first few years of being a mother, I loved it, it was the most amazing thing, but I also felt like, Is there something truly wrong with me that this feels SO HARD for me and looks so easy for everyone else? When you first have a child, if you’re not already in a safe motherhood space, there can be this feeling of, This shouldn’t be so hard, so clearly it’s me. Instagram accounts or writers or books that tell us that this is so much bigger than you, and here’s why, have been really comforting to me.
What brought that out for you? What were the things that felt really hard?
My labor was really traumatic, so that was my entry into motherhood. I had expected and hoped and worked toward one type of birth experience and I got something totally different and very traumatizing. I had really bad tearing and had to be sewn back up. Being injured and being emotionally traumatized was the first feeling of, wait, did I already fail? Intellectually, I knew I hadn’t failed at anything, but it still was the experience of having something happen that I hadn’t hoped for.
That got better, but then we hit the 4-month sleep regression, and my child didn’t sleep again for like a year. It was really dark days. There were months where she was up every hour. It was a lot of hours of crying. She never took a bottle, so there was nothing to soothe her except breastfeeding. And because breastmilk was one of the few things that would soothe her, my husband never learned how to soothe. That has persisted to this day. It wasn’t my husband’s fault, but he never learned how to soothe our children in the nighttime.
So not only was I not sleeping, I felt like I had no help, and it became a really bad cycle of no sleep, anxiety, anger toward him, and feeling like I was failing, really until she was 14 or 15 months. I think in retrospect I had postpartum anxiety and rage — which I didn’t know. I look back on it now and I can see so clearly what happened, but at the time, it was just survival desperation mode.
Societally, we don’t give moms a lot of support. It’s like, You’re on your own.
Nobody could really watch my kid for more than an hour or two, because she wouldn’t take a bottle. When that initial thing you thought would work doesn’t work, and your partner has to go to work, your own workload hasn’t changed. And in fact it’s just grown because now you have all this domestic labor too. You just end up feeling like this island of loneliness.
Culturally we’re like, Oh, but look, you’re so lucky, you work for yourself. And I am, but the side I didn’t expect was that I’m also going to get screwed. When there’s nobody to help, it’s all going to fall on me. I’m so “flexible” that I’m available. It’s another myth about motherhood, that if it’s a flexible schedule, it’s some golden ticket to balancing it all, but it often makes you more overwhelmed.
If you actually have child care, work can be a break. I know that’s not the case for every job. But in a lot of jobs, sitting in front of a computer is a thousand times easier than taking care of children. Often, your partner doesn’t understand that, if they aren’t at home with the kids. They think, “You were home all day, what’s the problem?”
I’ve had my own huge internal struggles with putting them in child care five days a week. I have this feeling of not wanting to miss their lives. I think there’s a part of me that thinks I need to have more time with them or I'll look back and regret it. So even when my kids were in child care, I kept them home 1-2 days a week to be with me. I’ve been trying to cram in a full-time job in less than full-time hours since I became a mother. So I think that’s what’s left me feeling pretty frazzled. Every naptime their whole lives has just been a mad rush to get work done.
And my husband doesn’t have any of those same guilt feelings toward child care. There’s no cultural expectation that he would be home with the kids. It’s been really hard for me to feel like I’m carrying around a lot of this guilt and he’s not.
So when you’re working, where are your kids?
For the first time ever, my daughter’s going to school five days a week. She just started kindergarten. I hadn’t even realized what that meant for me, work-wise. My child’s going to be at the same place, for the same hours, every day!
My son’s doing preschool two days and day care the other three, but from the beginning, it’s been just like piecing together all these puzzle pieces to figure out where and when I’m going to be able to work. I’ve done in-home day care mostly, which has been great, but there’s limited times, and they only have certain days available sometimes, and with COVID, obviously, it’s been closings, cancellations, everyone’s home for two weeks. So even though I’ve had some form of child care for most of the six years I’ve been a mother, I still don’t feel like I ever had really regular child care, even though all of our child care providers have been amazing.
Compared to the household you grew up in, what’s one thing you’re doing differently as a parent?
There’s a lot of little things, but something that’s important to me is that I’ve been very thoughtful about how we talk about our bodies, the shape of our bodies, what we eat. I had an eating disorder in high school, and from the youngest age ever, I saw my mom counting calories and talking about how fat she was, which I think was a big part of what you did as a woman in that generation. There were so many body image issues — it was just in the air I breathed. Even before I had kids, I was learning about how to parent children with a better love and respect for their bodies and accepting of all body types. I’ve been really careful about how I talk about myself.
I honestly think having children has really helped my body image - I know that’s not the case for everyone. I just feel like I don’t have time to think about it, but I know some people go in the other direction. I’ve spent my whole life worrying about my body and there's something so freeing about being too tired to worry about it. And I’ve just been really thoughtful in how we talk about food and everything.
What’s hard about parenting for you right now?
We’re in the throes of the tantrum years — when you’ve already gone through it, you can forget how intense it can be. He stopped napping recently, so there’s that confluence of being way too tired, starting preschool, and just being in those years of really wanting autonomy and not being super rational. It’s so hard for everyone to parent, but also my husband and I have different techniques for parenting that, so there’s some bumping up against each other and trying to find our way through it.
Being a united front has been challenging for us, because we come from very different families of origin and parenting styles. We get other ideas in different ways. It’s been something we’ve always struggled with.
When you have a baby, the issues are so obvious. It’s sleep or food or whatever. And then when they start to get older, the things you’re struggling with become really nuanced and really layered in a different way. It takes up so much mental space. In a tantrum, you see it coming on, you’re deciding what you’re going to do, what’s going on in our schedule right now, so now it's happening, how am I going to debrief, if my partner enters this tantrum situation, what’s going to happen then. When you’re actually in it, it’s so emotionally intense and exhausting.
I always say infants are not easy, but they are simple. There’s only so many things you can do. But when they get older, now there’s stuff you can’t fix.
I wasn’t prepared for the impact that would have on regulating my own emotions. I didn’t expect how draining and how intense that would be. And the more you’re with your kids, the more of that you’re doing. That’s another really tiring part of it that’s hard to quantify.
When you don’t have kids, you go to work and you get home and you have that time to unwind or debrief. You do that thing that helps you get back to that place of regulation if you’re exhausted or stressed. And as a parent, you just go from one thing to the next. There’s very little self-regulation time, or time to be quiet or alone. It’s like your nerves are always a little frayed. If you’re emotional or anxious, keeping all that together and being the kind of parent you want to be while you have these other people — it’s a lot. I’m still getting used to that.
Tell me something wonderful about your kids.
Something that I’ve been so surprised by is how fun and funny my kids are. They make me laugh just so much and so hard, and the things that they do that just bring me so much joy. They’re so silly or so funny or so creative — I just love it so much, it just feeds me! It builds us up and buoys us and makes it so worth it. They do the most bizarre things and I just love it. It’s the best to live with people who are just so free and joyful and just don’t even care.
Thanks to Mary Catherine for speaking with me! You can find her comics on Instagram at @momlife_comics, or check out her artwork and designs on her website, marycatherinestarr.com.