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Being ‘Selfish’ Makes Me a Better Mom


We put so much pressure on ourselves to do it all. For me, the realization and acceptance of the fact that I can’t be everything to everyone has been liberating. I know now that if I take the time and care to make sure I am at my best, I am able to be there for my family in an even more powerful and connected way. It is hard to let go and put yourself first when you are a mom, but the sooner you can give yourself a little space to breathe and recharge, the better off you will be. —Jessica Simpson, Guest Editor, the Honesty Issue

It’s 4:13 on a Friday afternoon, and I’m crouching on the tile floor behind my kitchen counter, the tea kettle boiling a few feet above my head, and one thought is running through my mind: Please don’t let my daughter find me back here.

My daughter, four years old, is passing through the kitchen on her way from the playroom to the hallway with her babysitter. They are going to check on my other daughter, one year old, who is napping. The four-year-old is dressed in a tutu and plastic high heels, and the sound of her casual, high-pitched banter causes my heart to squeeze. And yet my response when I heard her heeled clomping into the kitchen is to crouch low and flee out of sight.

The fact that it is 4:13 p.m. on a Friday means that I have 47 minutes of childcare remaining in my day—47 minutes left in the week to spend how I will: finishing up the writing I’ve been working on all week, cracking open the bound draft of the book I’ve promised to review for a fellow author, doing some quick office-floor yoga—or doing none of the above. Perhaps simply spending these last few minutes doing nothing more than drinking this tea in the kettle that is whistling above my head and simply relishing some quiet and peace and freedom to think. In 47 minutes I will say goodnight to my nanny, and I will scoop up my two daughters and once more take up the reins of mommying and dinner cooking and bath-time singing and bedtime reading and closet-monster exorcisms and so on.

Hence why I’m hiding in this squatting position, thinking: Please don’t let her find me. And then a second thought immediately follows on its heels: I am the worst mother in the world.

Years ago, at a baby shower for a friend, one of the older women in attendance, a mother whose children had grown into adulthood, gifted the expectant mother with a copy of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book Gift From the Sea, along with the insistent warning that my friend needed to remember to “fill her own vessel first.” The woman delivered the advice with a stony face and a stern voice, as if my friend were about to take off for an arduous journey on which she might very likely lose sight of everything around her, including—and especially—herself.

I nodded, all sage and subdued smiles, acting as though I’d understood this exhortation, but inwardly I was saying to myself, “Let’s take it easy here—it’s not like this woman is taking off for a solo summit of Everest! She’s taking off—destination: Motherhood! She’s going to have an adorable, squishy baby! She wants this, she’s excited! We’re all excited for her! This is going to be the best thing ever!”

A few years later I, too, became a mom. My daughter was rosy and healthy and happy, and I loved her instantaneously and intensely. A few years after that, I became a mother again to a second healthy, beautiful baby girl. I loved being a mom. I adored my girls. I also experienced a fatigue the likes of which I had not known possible—fatigue that felt simultaneously physical, mental, and emotional, all at the same time. Anxiety was suddenly a constant companion. Anxiety that kept me awake between the midnight and 3 a.m. feedings, which just felt cruel and pointless, given how badly I needed that precious sleep. I forgot words midsentence (a problem for a woman whose job is largely to finish sentences). I found that an afternoon could stretch to the length of an eternity. I realized that things that were challenging could also be really boring.

I realized that some of the women in my life really, really love the day-to-day work of being a mom. It’s not bogus, and it’s not for Instagram or for bragging rights at Mommy and Me Playgroup. Some women truly love babies, love nothing more than snuggling and smelling their newborns for hours on end on the couch without feeling the need to leave the house. Some women love toddlers and have an endless tolerance for impromptu sing-alongs and circular rounds of car-ride questions that have no satisfying answers or resolution. Some women in my life have told me that they love snow days because it means arts and crafts at home and pancakes made in the shape of snowmen. (Some men, like my husband, are like that too.)



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The Day My Mom Took Me to Rehab


I kept a safe distance until my parents convinced me to fly down to my hometown in Florida to spend a few weeks with them relaxing and job hunting. I was scared they would know that something was wrong, but I was in such deep denial about what was really happening with me that I figured I could keep them in the dark too. Even though I drank more frequently than not, almost always blacked out, and was spending hundreds of dollars on alcohol a week.

Like any person with substance-use disorder, I was performing serious mental acrobatics to convince myself and those around me that I was fine. I tried to drink less around my parents and was mostly successful, but there were a few drunken nights when they clearly knew something was wrong. It became impossible to hide when my mom and I took a girls’ weekend to visit her friends and I got so drunk at dinner that I wet the bed in the middle of the night.

It wasn’t the first time I had done this in recent months. Just the first time anyone knew about it.

Before my parents had a chance to bring up their concerns in earnest, I was flying back to New York, where I had landed another job. It had been almost three months since I was fired, and four months since my birthday, so I thought I was ready.

But the night before I was to start this new job, I drank. I don’t even know what possessed me at this point, but I did. When I didn’t show up for work on my first day, they called my emergency contact—my mom.

Two days later I woke up from a multiday blackout to my mom banging on the door of my apartment. She had flown 1,500 miles to take me to rehab. “I’m here to help you,” she said. “You need help.”

After almost a year of excessive drinking, of stress, of worries, of fear of failure, of unhappiness, of blackouts, of spending more money than I can admit on bottles on vodka, I was ready to acknowledge that she was right: I did have a problem with alcohol.

After my mom showed up on my doorstep, I cried. I also dry heaved all day as I dealt with what was possibly the worst hangover of my life. She was there the whole time, comforting me, bringing me water, helping me get a little food in my system. She was there to talk to me, to tell me how worried she was, to help me come up with a plan. We packed my bags, and I flew back to Florida with her to attend a 30-day treatment facility.

When it comes to talking about any kind of substance abuse, a common thing we hear is that you can’t help those who aren’t willing to help themselves. I don’t disagree with that statement, but I don’t think I can fully agree with it either. If it wasn’t for the fights with my roommate, I wouldn’t have begun to suspect that my weekend drinking was getting out of hand. If it wasn’t for my friends expressing concern over my birthday drunkenness, I wouldn’t have begun to fully recognize that my behavior was becoming a problem. If it wasn’t for my mom coming to my rescue when I couldn’t admit I needed it, I wouldn’t have gotten help.

The months of denials, of lying both to myself and to my loved ones, would likely have continued if it wasn’t for all of these small interventions. It wasn’t as dramatic as you often see on television—nobody gathered me in a room and read me letters about how much they loved me and how much my behavior was hurting them—but it was still powerful. All these little moments added up to one big one, and I was finally able to admit that I had a problem with alcohol and needed help to fix it.

After a month in rehab (where I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder) and another month in a sober-living house, I went back to my apartment in New York. But after a few months and a few relapses, I realized that staying sober while trying to fit back into my own life just wasn’t possible for me. So exactly a year after I lost my dream job, my mom made the 1,500 mile trip to help me one more time. She helped me pack up my apartment and move home to Florida, where I could focus on my recovery and on building a healthier life.



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Alison Pill: ‘I Thought Mom Brain Would Be the End of Me—It Became My Super Power.’


It started with crosswords. Or rather, the lack of them. Or rather, the lack of me doing them. My brain was a little muddled, and names were not coming to me as easily as they once had, so suddenly crosswords weren’t as fun. Also books. And scary movies. And talking to people. I blamed the baby who’d suddenly taken up residence in my body.

I had complicated feelings about becoming a mom. As a feminist, I wondered how this new person would affect my work and how my work would affect this new person. How would I make sure I still had interesting things to talk about and not turn into a mom person who only wanted to chat about her kid? How would I keep my identity clear to myself, my husband, and this human?

I was between acting jobs when I got pregnant, and therefore was forced to a very luxuriously long (and very frustratingly unpaid) maternity leave. (Shockingly, no one was looking to hire a pregnant actress for non-pregnant parts.) It was the longest break I’d taken from working since I was 12. And surprisingly? I was into it. I was obsessed with the creature inside me, and what kind of curtains that person might enjoy as I decorated our nursery. I’ve never cared about curtains so much in my life.

Alison Pill in The Newsroom. 

Courtesy of HBO

Then I hit my third trimester and discovered that one of the great tragedies in the life of a pregnant lady is being unable to sleep. The little monster inside of me had taken my body’s stillness at night as an invitation to perform their own dances and yoga routines. It was wonderful…and annoying.

As a result of only sleeping from 3 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. most days (feeling thankful for every precious minute) and dealing with wave after wave of hormone changes, my brain was feeling…different. Less rested, more volatile. As the months passed, I gave up on crosswords past Thursday. I gave up on books that weren’t hilariously addictive crime fiction (Carl Hiassen in particular gave me joy in those very uncomfortable months). I gave up on movies that couldn’t guarantee a happy ending. And conversations about anything other than puppies and rainbows.

I hadn’t even given birth yet and already I had “mom brain”—I couldn’t have the same conversations or read the same books. I felt less and less recognizable to myself.

Eventually, the creature keeping me up all night from inside my body began keeping me up all night while outside of my body. It was a thrilling change becoming a mom, but did nothing for my sleep habits or my emotional consistency. I was a human puddle of hormones, thrilled when I got to have a shower, let alone a conversation with my husband that didn’t revolve around feeding schedules. I started to feel lonely, as so many new moms do—understandable given the person you spend the most time with sees you as a pair of nipples and a warm body. That person doesn’t share your love of Russian literature, or your interest in great plays. That person wants milk, sleep, cuddles, and to figure out how to make their eyes work. Fascinating and inspiring and beautiful though they are, infants are terrible conversationalists.

Deep into the disorienting haze of mom brain, I came upon a study outlining how pregnancy literally reduces the gray matter of your brain. The gist is that through “synaptic pruning,” a pregnant woman’s brain goes through a change similar to adolescence in its restructuring—some aspects of your cognition become weaker while others become sharper in an effort to better tailor your brain to the challenges of motherhood.

The idea that my brain was redefining what it could and would do was terrifying. I’d spent nine months surrendering so many things I thought were essential to my being—my body, my job, my irresponsibility. No one mentioned I’d also be giving up my brain as I knew it. But reading the study made me feel like someone had reached out to say, “It’s okay. Your brain is normal. You’ll be alright.” My lizard brain desire to protect my kid and lack of patience for social interactions that felt inauthentic suddenly made sense. Evolution is cool like that.

Motherhood did change my identity, right down to my gray matter, but not in the scary ways I’d feared. I used to have hours in a day to learn lines, to dream up character ideas, to wallow in self-indulgent actor stuff. Now I only have nap time to do all that but I find my brain can shift into different modes so much more swiftly. Mom brain isn’t such a bad thing.

Mother and child in black and white.

Alison Pill and Wilder. 

Joshua Leonard

More than anything, I’ve learned it’s impossible to get it right as parents, and yet, we do it anyway. Accepting the less-than-perfect scenario is my new cognitive superpower, and momhood lets me practice it every single day.

My kid is three now and my mom brain has continued evolving—mostly thanks to the fact that I now cohabitate with a little Question Machine. I try to limit myself to one “just because” answer per day, which means I have to do a lot of research. It’s exciting and humbling to realize just how little you know when grilled by a three-year-old.

My mom brain has become a time management expert, a more humble and patient servant, and a curious challenger—and I’ve never been more grateful for the work it does. Even if it means I don’t do crosswords all that often anymore. After all, I’ve got to use my mom brain to explain optical physics (AKA rainbows) to my three-year-old.

Alison Pill is mom to Wilder and also an actor. She can be seen in Star Trek: Picard and in the upcoming DEVS and Them.



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Shawn Johnson: ‘My C-Section Made Me Feel Like A Failure As a Mom’


Four-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Shawn Johnson East—like so many women—has incredibly high expectations of herself. So when the delivery of her daughter Drew Hazel didn’t go as she’d planned, she felt like she’d failed in her first moments of motherhood. “I went in with such a stubborn mindset of thinking the only way I could bring our baby into the world was naturally. No meds no intervention. At 14 hours when I chose to get an epidural, I felt guilty. At 22 hours when we were told I had to get a C-section, I felt like I had failed,” she wrote on Instagram. Here, Johnson East opens up to Glamour about the complicated world of social media moms, wrestling with mom guilt, and what it means to be a strong mother.

As an athlete, I had one mentality: you have to be strong, not weak. I was never one to take pain medication, worried it might affect my performance or somehow make me less of an elite athlete. Fast forward to motherhood, and those same attitudes applied. I muscled through the aches and pains of pregnancy, never wanting to be ‘that complaining pregnant woman,’ and planned to have a natural birth—it was my body against the pain. It was my first real mom decision and I felt like the safest option for my baby was going natural. That’s what I thought it meant to be a strong mother.

Things did not go as planned. Fourteen hours into labor, I asked for an epidural. By 22 hours, I was being taken for a C-section.

It my first wave of mom guilt. I felt like I’d caved, like I was selfish for getting the epidural. I wondered, Am I already making a poor decision for my child? I felt guilty, like I wasn’t doing this for my daughter but as a selfish reaction to the pain. And when doctors told me I’d need a C-section, I felt like this beautiful dream I’d had as a first-time mom to do the best thing for my child had failed. I know that C-sections are relatively safe procedures—safer than delivering vaginally in some cases—but I couldn’t stop thinking, What if something goes wrong because I selfishly decided to do this? I felt like I had failed her already.

There’s so much pressure on moms to be perfect. We tell moms that they have to be perfect otherwise they’re going to scar their child, raise them the wrong way, and leave them with issues that will be all mom’s fault. Sometimes it feels like no matter what decision you make, it’s the wrong one. In the hospital, I had this painful doubt: Am I already doing something wrong for my baby?

People on social media have a lot to say about this. We all know the mommy shamers—I’ve already been asked how dare I not breastfeed—people with such passionate opinions and an appetite for confrontation. It can breed a very negative mindset that you’re doing everything wrong for your child. But there’s another side to social media that offers so much support and makes moms not some idealized figures but human.

I know this from personal experience. Three years ago, my husband and I shared our miscarriage on social media—it was such a random leap of faith but opening up about that pain was really the only thing that got me through it. Thousands of women reached out with their own stories and it showed me a whole community that I didn’t really see before. It made me feel so much less alone.

After 22 hours of labor ending in a C-section, our daughter Drew Hazel East was born happy and healthy. After we brought her home, I thought about how healing it felt to share my miscarriage and decided to open up about feeling like a failure for having a C-section. I still had doubts about the whole thing—Should I feel guilty? Did I do the right thing? Seeing messages like “I went through the same thing and I felt the same way,” was so reassuring. I stopped feeling like a failure as a mom and felt human again.

When we’d shared our miscarriage story, I felt this frustration: Why aren’t these feelings of insecurity and shame talked about more? Why do women feel like they have to keep it hidden? I think the same thing goes for having a kid—people make every topic so dramatic, so controversial, and so political. You’re a natural birth mom or an elective C-section mom. A breastfeeding mom or a formula mom. A stay-at-home mom or a working mom. There are so many topics that just alienate you from the world immediately.

I think that’s the wrong approach. The moment I got to hold my daughter for the first time, I literally could have laughed at myself and everything that I cared about before that moment. For me to have cared so much about what it would mean if I had an epidural was crazy—I’d brought my daughter into the world happy and healthy. And that was all that mattered in my first moments as a mom.

Now I think being strong as a mom is learning how to go with the flow. You can have your plans and you can have your preferences about what’s best, but at the end of the day it’s about you and your child figuring things out together. Being strong as a mom isn’t sticking to a plan, it’s figuring it out and wrestling through it. It’s about being able to hold your baby and say, “Okay, we made it one step closer to whatever the goal is.” And being okay with however you get there.

Shawn Johnson East is an Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast, YouTuber and mom. Follow her at @shawnjohnson.





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I Want to Be a Hot Mom.


At my last haircut I told my stylist I wanted to go short, but like, French-girl short, not “mom hair” short. She nodded immediately. Because, of course, I don’t want mom hair. I left the salon feeling light and bouncy. When I texted my sister a selfie, she replied with, “yessss HOT mom!” There’s pressure on women at all stages of life to be attractive, but there’s something particularly gratifying about being perceived as not just a mom, but a hot mom.

My desire to be hot didn’t start after birth—I was told through Barbie, through animated mermaids, through the cool clique in high school, through the manic pixie dream girls of the early aughts, by everyone really, that to be hot was to be valuable. And by hot, I mean thin, conventionally very pretty, and sexually desirable. Catching a man’s interest was the pinnacle of mattering.

So I muddled through unfortunate wispy bangs and purple braces until I felt something close to hot in college. My boobs emerged and I wore tight tops from Wet Seal. My look has changed through the years (Abercrombie & Fitch clone, Anthropologie boho, quirky boys’ T-shirts from Goodwill to communicate that I was “chill”), but my goal was always the same: to be whichever version of “hot” the guy I was with wanted. Eventually, all this effort led to an engagement, which led to a wedding, which led to my ultimate performance of hotness: blushing bride. Everyone told me I was beautiful, and I stuffed myself with external validation until I felt full.

In my first trimester of pregnancy, I frantically Googled “cute bump,” “bump vs. bloat,” and “celebrity maternity style.” Olivia Wilde was aspirational. Beyoncé was otherworldly. “Have you popped yet?” asked my cousin over the phone, to which I would woefully respond in the negative. When my soft belly finally turned hard and round, I felt relief, and the relief was justified when people said, “You can’t even tell you’re pregnant from the back!” Or “You’re so tiny!” Or “All belly!”

Me, during pregnancy.

Image may contain Cushion Human Person Face Headrest and Car Seat

My “not mom hair” haircut.

Writer Ashley Fetters wrote about mom jeans (and how adding “mom” to anything renders it immediately uncool) for The Atlantic, referencing the famed SNL sketch which includes the line: “I’m not a woman anymore. I’m a mom.” And while the sketch is hilarious, I think it rings eerily true for many of us. Recovering from childbirth in the hospital, the nurses all called me “mom” as if my real name—my real self—was no longer relevant.



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14 Gift Ideas Your Mom Is Guaranteed to Love


If there’s a mom or mother figure you’re shopping for this season, you’re probably wondering how to translate “thank you for raising me, supporting me…and buying my ticket home this year” into a present. And while she’d claim seeing you IRL (or over a nice, long video chat) is enough, we found gift ideas any mom would appreciate.

From thoughtful jewelry, like an engravable gold bracelet, to entertaining must-haves (think fancy olive oil), and cozy picks for homebodies, there’s something your mom, mommy, or mama is guaranteed to love in this list. Ahead, shop our 14 gift ideas for mom.

All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.



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