Why balancing work and motherhood is still hard

It obviously struck deep at my mother's core because she talked about it more than just a few times — how she had given up her fledgling career as a lawyer in Kanpur when she married my father.

But why? I would ask on cue.

In my mother's mind, the two were irreconcilable. You either had a career or you had a family. The choice, as she saw it, was absolute.

Ten years after she passed, I am on the phone with my elder daughter. She is calling from the airport, on her way to a work trip, guilty at leaving behind her six-month-old daughter with her father.

How is it that more than six decades after my mother made that choice, the same dilemma shadows her granddaughter? Yes, things have changed. Women no longer believe it's a stark choice between career and family. But the one thing that has survived across generations is the internalised guilt that seems to attach itself almost exclusively to mothers.

The guilt that cuts across class, though the privileged have the purchasing power to outsource care. For others, the cost can be brutal. Rani Baa, a migrant from Odisha who has worked in Delhi for over 30 years, says it was possible to do so only because her daughter was brought up by her family back home. She missed her child's growing up years, seeing her just once a year.

Economists talk of the motherhood penalty that affects career trajectories. A 2024 study of 134 countries by academics from the London School of Economics and Princeton University found that on average 24% of women leave the labour force in the first year after the birth of their first child. Five years later, 17% are still absent. And after 10 years, 15% will not rejoin the workforce.

Women don't have to make the choice my mother did any longer. We juggle multiple identities as mothers, professionals, gym-goers, solo travelers, discoverers of new passions, companions to aging parents and baby-sitters to grandchildren.

And yet it is hard — because we are constantly judged, our mothering is always under scrutiny, and because patriarchy has convinced us that raising a child is, ultimately, a mother's work, a duty elevated to almost mythic levels. Fathers provide, mothers are expected to be inexhaustible.

And so, generation after generation, without complaint, we plough ahead, apologetic and guilty for never being enough.

Perhaps we've set up impossibly high standards for ourselves. Leaning in cannot be one person's responsibility. If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to support the mother.

"How do you justify women staying at home and men going to work?" asks Utkarsha Jagga, founder of The Coping Central that focuses on mental health. "If care-giving comes 'naturally' to women, why do you have to constantly keep excelling at it?"

Jagga advocates being a "good enough mother", a term coined by British pediatrician Donald Winnicott in the early 1950s. "Children don't need perfect mothers," she explains. "They need a good-enough mother who can be a caregiver but also hold the capacity to disappoint us. That is what allows emotionally healthy adults to be formed."

My daughters do not have to choose, as my mother believed she did. But until care is seen as a human responsibility shared equally by both parents and not segregated by gender, the old guilt will travel generation to generation.

My mother believed motherhood demanded sacrifice. My daughter knows it should not require surrender. That is progress — hard won, incomplete but worthy of celebrating this Mother's Day.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender and other social issues and has 35-plus years of experience in journalism. She has edited books and features in a documentary on sexual violence. The views expressed are personal