Tess Holliday Gets Brutally Honest About the Pressures of Being a Working Mom

From Redbook

Motherhood isn’t glamorous – it can be incredibly taxing and shake your confidence even on good days. That stands true even if you’re a mom and a model, a career in which confidence is crucial to your success.

Leave it to Tess Holliday to write a super powerful Instagram post that speaks volumes – in the imagery and in the caption – about how soul crushing all that can be.

“This is the reality of being a mom,” she wrote. ” I’ve been up since 3 am, and every time I get Bowie to sleep and try to lay him down, he wakes up. He is teething and has no clue I have to work today, and most days I can work 15 hour days, take care of both boys and put some lipstick on and deal with it. Most days I drink my coffee and smile at every little thing he does thinking it’s the best thing in the world, but not today.”

At first, this seems like just another viral post from a mom blogger about the realities of being a mom, but a lot of those posts are brushed off with a “har har har chuckle, how funny is this mess?” vibe – not with a teary-eyed photo or a confession that, nope, she’s not feeling OK.

“I’ve been crying for nearly two hours, and I’m crying as I write this,” she went on. “I’ve reached my limit, exceeded it to be honest. My confidence has taken a blow with this birth and it wasn’t until this morning I realized why. The pressure of ‘looking good’ for a living is too much today. When your face is breaking out from the hormones of breastfeeding and total exhaustion from lack of sleep, bags under your eyes, patchy red skin and to top it off no energy to work out or leave my bed.. how do you do it? How do you feel confident in your skin and feel like you aren’t letting the client down by showing up exhausted and disheveled?”

I’d argue that something has changed recently: There’s less pressure to look perfect as a mom – thanks to the Internet, people know there’s no right or wrong way about motherhood looks like – but there is implicit pressure to feel good about yourself, regardless of what’s going on with your body. Battle cries of “you’re beautiful as you are!” can mitigate a little bit of the frustrations, but there are obviously days when women just feel like garbage. And it’s really not fair to tell them that they have to feel great 100% of the time.

“Yes, I chose a career based on my looks and I’m the first one to say that beauty isn’t what should drive you, it’s certainly not what motivates me,” Holliday wrote. “As a working mom in an industry that’s as critical as mine, where is the line? The balance? The compassion? Is any career understanding when you show up at negative 10% because your kids wouldn’t let you sleep and you want to hide under your covers and cry? Not many. I hope one day that changes and society views mothers as the flawed human beings we are that are just trying to keep our shit together like everyone else.” She signed off her post with hashtags that really drove her point home: “#effyourbeautystandards #disruptperfectmomsyndrome.”

Preach, Tess.

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