The Unseen Weight

The Unseen Weight

Screams echo through the walls. Tiny fists pound against the bedroom door. A toy shatters on the floor, and for a split second, silence rushes in, sharp and heavy. Then, another cry—this one mine, swallowed quickly before it dares leave my throat.

This is motherhood.

Not the filtered photos with pink bows and toothless smiles, not the staged milestones with captioned hashtags. This is the raw, relentless truth that few mothers will say out loud: it’s hard. Brutally, achingly hard. And harder still because the world expects you to carry it with a smile.

When my daughter turned three, everyone said, “Oh, this is the fun age.” They meant well. They pictured her waddling in mismatched socks, asking a hundred “why’s” in a sing-song voice, and twirling around in glittery dresses. And yes, she does those things. But they didn’t see the meltdowns over the wrong color cup, the refusal to sleep, the sudden fevers, the endless laundry, and the tantrums that explode like storms with no warning.

What they really didn’t see—what no one talks about—is the invisible weight that sits on my shoulders simply because I am the mother.

I don’t raise her alone. I live with my husband and my mother-in-law. Together, we are a team—at least, that’s the theory. Everyone contributes. My mother-in-law feeds her breakfast when I rush out for work. My husband reads bedtime stories when I collapse into bed too early. They both help with school drop-offs when schedules twist out of control.

But here’s the strange, twisted knot in it all: the moment I step through the front door, it’s as though an unspoken contract is triggered. Suddenly, the responsibility tilts—no, topples—onto me. If she cries, the cries are directed at me. If she refuses to eat, the plate is handed over to me. If she needs a bath, pajamas, or cuddles, it is my name she calls, my arms she demands.

It’s not that they won’t help. They do. But there is an expectation stitched into the walls of this house, quiet but undeniable: Mum is home now. Mum will take over.

It’s funny, in a painful way. When I am not there, my husband and my mother-in-law pull together like a well-oiled machine. They feed her, distract her, put her to bed. They laugh together over how clever she is, how demanding she can be. And she accepts their love, their routines. But the minute I return, the harmony splinters. She clings to me like a shadow, demands from me what she would have happily accepted from them.

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s instinct—her need for me above anyone else. Other times, I think it’s just society’s script playing itself out: children turn to mothers because the world tells them mothers should be the primary source of comfort, discipline, nourishment, and love.

I rarely speak of this. Other mums rarely do either. Why? Because the moment we confess the exhaustion, the unfairness, the bone-deep frustration, judgment comes fast and sharp.

“You should be grateful—many women do this without help.”

“That’s just motherhood, don’t complain.”

“If you didn’t want the responsibility, why did you have kids?”

These words sting not because they’re true, but because they’re cruel. They erase the complexity, the reality that raising a child has never been a one-person job. It takes a whole house, a whole community, to raise a child well. But somewhere along the line, the weight of it was funneled mostly onto mothers, leaving us to drown silently while smiling for photographs.

Evenings are the hardest. I come home from a day that has already drained me—patients at work, colleagues with endless requests, a body aching from hours on my feet. And still, when I open the door, I’m greeted not with rest but with new tasks: dinner negotiations with a picky toddler, bath time battles, cleaning up toys that scatter like landmines. My husband sits at the dining table scrolling through his phone, my mother-in-law sighs as if her day is done, and I—well, I tie my hair back and get on with it. Because that’s what’s expected.

Inside, though, a small voice whispers: Why me? Why always me?

The answer is complicated. It’s love, yes. The kind that keeps you moving even when your knees tremble. But it’s also guilt—the guilt that mothers are fed from the moment the pregnancy test turns positive. Guilt that if we don’t do enough, don’t give enough, don’t sacrifice enough, we are failing.

So, we don’t speak up. We don’t tell friends how lonely the nights feel, how exhausting it is to be touched, called, needed every second. We don’t admit that sometimes, we envy our husbands’ freedom to step outside, to focus on themselves, to switch off. Because if we did, the world would call us ungrateful.

But here is the truth I’ve begun to learn, whispered in the quiet moments when my daughter is finally asleep: silence doesn’t serve us.

If we never say how hard it is, no one will know. If we never ask for help, no one will offer. If we keep pretending we can do it all, the expectation will stay cemented in place.

It really does take a house to raise a child. I see it when my mother-in-law rocks her to sleep, humming lullabies older than me. I see it when my husband takes her hand and teaches her to kick a ball. I see it in myself when I hold her after a tantrum, both of us exhausted but wrapped in a love that even fatigue cannot erase.

But the house only works when the weight is shared, when the unspoken contract is rewritten—not just assumed because I am “Mum.”

The other night, I broke the silence. My voice shook, but I said it anyway: “I need help. I can’t do everything the second I come home. I need you both to step in, even when I’m here.”

The air hung heavy for a moment. My husband blinked, my mother-in-law frowned. Then, slowly, they nodded. It wasn’t magic—nothing changed overnight—but something shifted. Dinner became a shared effort. Bath time wasn’t automatically handed to me. My daughter still clings, still calls “Mama” first, but I’ve learned to say gently, “Papa can help you too,” and let her adjust.

Raising a child will never be easy. It is the hardest, most relentless, most heart-shattering and heart-expanding work I’ve ever known. But it should not be lonely. It should not be a silent burden hidden behind polite smiles.

We, mothers, have to start speaking—because when we do, we remind the world that raising a child is not a one-woman job. It is a family job. A community job. A whole-house job.

And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us speak, the next mother won’t have to choke back her tears in the kitchen, whispering them into the steam of a boiling pot. She’ll be heard, she’ll be helped, and she’ll know she was never meant to carry it all alone.