The Suffering Club
Shared misery can be healing, until it isn't.
Ever since I started my blog, 12 years ago, I have often touched on the subject of complaining. Because there is a part of me that loves to complain. And not in a whiny, pointless, entitled way. Maybe “complain” is the wrong word: share, vent, commiserate, connect, even? Looking back, I believe motherhood may have ushered me into my love of communal complaining.
Because whenever I droned on about fishing craisin-speckled feces out of the tub with a bath toy, the indignity of the nap time routine, how I longed for my child to stop. saying. my. name. (Wait, I have an actual name, and it isn’t Mommy), and other moms popped up with “Oh my god, me toooo!” I felt less alone. And they felt less alone. And together, we felt less defective; we’d released the pressure valve just a little.
That to me is productive complaining. Because most of that stuff isn’t changeable; it’s just a fact of motherhood. Children will always be challenging—irritating even—and the tedium of our Groundhog’s Day routine can be maddening, but it is part of the package. And so it helps when we reach out and share our absurd stories and breaking-point moments. It helps even more when we dig a little deeper and hesitantly confess that we don’t know who we are anymore and we have no idea what we are doing. It’s led Stacey and I to start The Mother Plus Podcast.
All of a sudden there were heads nodding along when we confessed that we didn’t like playing with our children. Other moms, too, had lost their shit upon missing the bus. Other women looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize themselves.
It’s also why I started writing again when my oldest was a toddler. I needed to release the poison—aka, the daily annoyances, my deep-seated fear that I was inadequate, my shameful ambivalence about my role as mother—and I needed to know that other women felt the same way. My honesty healed them; it healed me.
I repeated it like a mantra: “I love my kids more than anything; sometimes I don’t like being a mom.” What I didn’t yet understand was that undiagnosed ADHD made “normal mom” things a struggle for me, which made me feel badly about myself, which made me, not shockingly, not enjoy certain aspects of my life as a mother.
As I said on one of our podcast episodes: It’s no wonder I feel ambivalent about something that makes me feel bad about myself; It’s like a fish saying, “I’m so ambivalent about being on this ski lift.” In some ways, I felt like I was born to be a mother; in others, I felt like I wasn’t cut out for it, or more accurately, the demands of motherhood were not cut out for my neurodivergent brain I didn’t yet understand. Now, I can thrive (mostly, let’s be honest) as a mother with a better grasp of how I can work with the brain I have; back then, I just felt like I was drowning.
And every time I confessed with raw honesty—in a blog post, to trusted friends on a play date—what it felt like to be floundering in parenthood, to admit I felt empty or frustrated or clueless, I felt connected to a larger community of women. It was such a relief.
But as is the case with everything, there is a line. And it’s a line that is so easy to cross. Because when we compare our shared experiences in the trenches, it’s normalizing. But what if every so often, we normalize things that shouldn’t be normalized? I wrote this on my Mommy, for Real Facebook page last week, and once again, I was comforted and inspired by the solidarity:
Can we talk about "The Suffering Club?" You are part of one, even if you didn't realize it. I shared a piece that was published today, about my divorce and single parenting, and someone commented about the fear that keeps women from leaping without a safety net. I replied that I was all too familiar with this; it took me months after leaping without a net before I realized that I *was* the net all along.
It's not just fear that keeps women (and people of ALL genders) from leaving unhealthy or unsatisfying relationships. It's the Suffering Club. We sit around patios at dusk and brunch tables and whisper in hushed tones about unfulfilling sex lives or husbands who golf too much or can't load the dishes properly. We complain about clueless spouses or empty connections; we share that we feel lonely and sometimes the rage wakes us up in the night.
We ask hesitantly, "Is this all there is?"
When heads nod, we feel relieved. Yes, we are miserable, but so is everybody else! Like our babies and toddlers, we too are right on track. Our marriages are textbook: frustrating, boring, empty.
Forget the fact that one friend remains silent when the others complain about how they never want to have sex. Disregard the couple you can tell truly like each other, the ones who hold hands under the table; the ones whose eyes crinkle when they hear the same joke they've heard a million times.
Pay attention only to the other members of The Suffering Club. They will keep you safely in this marriage; you can complain together every Friday after Zumba and in the school pickup line and whenever you accidentally drink too much and reveal how sad you are.
We interviewed a pelvic floor physical therapist on our podcast once. She offhandedly remarked that so many women swap stories about how they pee when they jump or sneeze after they have babies. That they complain how sex hurts, and again heads nod, and they wear their shared pain like a badge of honor with a shrug: "Well, motherhood is hard; what did you expect?"
Yes, motherhood is hard. But you can also do physical therapy and not pee on the trampoline. Yes, marriage is work and being an adult requires sacrifice and reality checks and compromise and self-awareness. But you can also leave a marriage and live your one "wild and precious life" without a daily emptiness, without the "Is this all there is?" question rattling around in your head while you pretend you aren't constantly disappointed.
Someday I may get married again; maybe, maybe not. I will probably have a partner. He will probably annoy the shit out of me sometimes and he won't load the dishwasher the way I want and maybe he won't appreciate my sensitivity and we will argue. But I won't leave because he sees me and knows me and loves me the way I want to be loved.
I am not proposing we burn down all the villages. I am not suggesting women head to divorce attorneys in droves. But I am suggesting that maybe we don't rely solely on The Suffering Club for clues as to whether we stay or go, whether we keep peeing on the trampoline (sorry guys) or find a physical therapist. We do not need to wear pain like a badge of honor. We can jump. We do not need a net. We are the net.
XOXO,
Steph
My essay on Midstory from a few weeks ago:
I would absolutely love to write and connect with you this summer!
The HerStories Project is offering a writing critique group for midlife women that begins this week! This group’s feedback will take place primarily in an online forum, and meeting are optional. Sign up here!
And the Mother Plus Podcast has several free options for connection this summer. Our ADHD Moms Club is a free community for support, interaction, venting, resource-sharing, and virtual body-doubling sessions where we get shit done together! Find us here!
We are also joining Dr. Christine Li—an incredible procrastination coach with had on the podcast—for her 5-day Challenge to De-clutter and Reenergize your home. She is amazing and this is a FREE experience to kick off summer with less stress and overwhelm. It comes at a perfect time, and I need all the help I can get with this! You can sign up to join me here.
Listen to our conversation with Dr. Li here and learn more about what she has to offer. Our discussion around language of “dread/ I hate this / I suck at this” has already helped me reshape some of my patterns. Episode here.