I don't want kids. I have been unambiguous about this since I was approximately nineteen years old, sitting in my aunt Deb's kitchen watching her wrangle three kids under six while ALSO making biscuit gravy from scratch and somehow keeping a conversation going, and I thought: she is a superhuman and I am not that. I made peace with that truth a long time ago. The decision is made. It is filed. The drawer is shut and I am not opening it back up because someone in the comments has opinions.
So when the "I love being a mom" trend started flooding my TikTok, all these videos of women genuinely lit up from the inside, just declaring this thing out loud like it's revolutionary, I expected to scroll past. Maybe feel a vague benign nothing. Maybe even a small private relief that I opted out of what looked like a beautiful and absolutely exhausting life.
I did not scroll past. I watched for two hours and I cried three times. which surprised me, because I'm not a crier. Ask my secondhand chair, which has witnessed me draft songs about genuinely devastating things without so much as a sniffle. Something about those videos got me. I've been trying to figure out what, exactly, because I think it matters.
why the "I love being a mom" trend hits different
At their core those videos are women claiming joy without apologizing for it. That's it. No asterisk, no "but it's so hard sometimes" addendum, no performance of exhaustion to prove they're taking it seriously. Just: I love this. This is mine. I'm saying it out loud.
That's rarer than it sounds. Women don't get a lot of permission to simply declare joy about their choices without hedging. We're supposed to balance every positive statement with a disclaimer. "I love being a mom, but..." or "I love my career, but..." The "but" is the social admission ticket, proof that we're not delusional, that we know the other side exists, that we're sufficiently grateful and humble and realistic. It's exhausting is what it is.
These women threw the "but" in the garbage. Watching them just be FULL, unhedged, in their thing, hit me somewhere I didn't expect. Because I recognize that feeling. I feel it when I'm deep in a song and the whole world collapses down to one chord change and I know I got it. That's what their faces look like. Like they got it.
I posted about this on @vixenraefr and the response was wild. DMs from people saying "me too, I'm childfree and I bawled," and also from moms saying "thank you for saying it's okay that we love this." neither group surprised me actually. Because what we're all hungry for is the same thing: permission to be all the way in our lives without apology.
what motherhood looks like from the outside
I grew up watching women in my church treat motherhood like a civic duty, something you were called to, something that redeemed you as a woman, something the whole community would be watching to make sure you got right. The pressure was immense. The joy, when it was visible, was always tied up with the duty. "Children are a blessing from the Lord" (Psalm 127:3, if you want the bumper-sticker citation). Which, sure, maybe. But framing your entire identity through that lens puts the weight of God's approval on your parenting, and that is a lot to carry while also trying to keep a small human alive.
What these TikTok moms are doing is something different. They're separating the joy from the duty. They're not saying "I love being a mom because God ordained it." They're saying "I love being a mom because I love MY kid and this weird messy beautiful specific relationship is the realest thing in my life." That's secular. That's human. That's a person choosing love over obligation, even when they showed up via obligation in the first place.
Watching that kind of love, the kind that's been stripped of its institutional justification and still stands, does something to me. I find it more convincing than the church version. More true. It doesn't need a theological framework to make sense. It just IS.
I've been noodling on a line for the record I'm making, something about how love doesn't need a referee, and watching MomTok at 1am crystallized it for me. which is to say: I am getting songwriting material from mommy content. My life is rich and strange.
patience, the thing I am genuinely trying to learn
What I watched in those videos, the good ones, the real ones and not the ones clearly performing for brand deals, was patience. An almost supernatural patience. Not passive patience where you're white-knuckling it until the moment passes. Active patience, the kind where you stay present, you don't disappear into your phone, you explain the same thing for the fifteenth time without contempt in your voice.
I am working on this. Actively, consciously, with mixed results. I am an insomniac who drinks cold coffee because I forget it exists and then I'm frustrated that it's cold. I am the person who edits the same four bars of a demo for three hours and then snaps at myself in the mirror. Patience is not my native language. I've been learning it like a second one.
Watching moms embody it so publicly has been genuinely instructive. Not in a "and that's why you should have kids" way, please I beg, do not come at me with that in the comments. But the way watching any master at work is instructive. You go, huh, that's what that looks like. You note it. You try to borrow it.
The patience I'm borrowing isn't for children. It's for the record I'm making, which refuses to be finished on my schedule. It's for the people in my life who are working through their own hard things at their own pace. It's for myself, when I'm three rewrites into a bridge and I want to throw Sunday out the window. Sunday is my beat-up acoustic, been with me forever, and she does not deserve that. The MomTok kind of patience. That's the one I need.
found family and the love that counts
Here's what finally made me cry the third time. It wasn't a mother and child. It was a comment. Some woman had posted one of those "I love being a mom" videos and a commenter, a young woman clearly struggling, had written "I didn't have a mom like you and watching this healed something." And the original poster had replied with this long genuinely beautiful thing about how she saw her and was glad she was there.
Complete strangers. Three sentences. I was done.
Because that's the thing about love in the era of social media: it doesn't have to be biological to be real. The community that forms around genuine warmth is real. The healing that happens when you watch someone love freely and let it mirror what you didn't have, that's real. Love operates at a distance now. It always could, I think, but now we watch it happen in real time and it accumulates.
I think about my own found family a lot lately. The friends who show up with food when things are bad. The people in my DMs who write to say a song I made at 2am helped them through something I'll never know the full details of. Lazarus, my pothos, who keeps coming back every time I forget to water him. okay, Lazarus is a plant, but there's a metaphor there I haven't finished working out. The people who've built something like home around themselves without the structures they were handed. That's MomTok energy applied broadly: this is mine, I love it, I'm saying it out loud.
the actual lesson
What MomTok taught me, a woman who will not be having children, who watched hours of content she was not the target demographic for:
Love is loudest when it's free of obligation. When you've stripped away the social pressure, the religious framework, the "supposed to," and what's left is just, I choose this, I'm in this, I love this thing, that's when it becomes something other people can see themselves in. Even people who don't share the thing.
That's what those women are doing whether they know it or not. They're not just celebrating motherhood. They're modeling what it looks like to be ALL THE WAY in your life. And I am here for it. I'm taking notes. I'm writing songs about it, sort of. Growing as a person, probably, at 1am with cold coffee and a plant that refuses to die, which is honestly my ideal setting for growth.
To every mom who makes videos like that: I see you. You are doing something that matters beyond your own house. Keep going.
And to the rest of you figuring out how to be all the way in YOUR thing, whatever that is, the childfree version, the childless-by-circumstance version, the still-figuring-it-out version: you deserve to make a video about it too. Or a blog post. Or, you know, a whole album.
Working on it. I'll let you know when it's done.