I wouldnt feel guilty if I were a man.

It starts to well up inside me. Call it discontentment, call it exhaustion, call it depression. It’s a feeling of pointlessness. Sometimes I struggle to believe that it all matters. The breastfeeding, the nose wiping, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Not in a suicidal “I’m depressed way” although, that has happened too, but in a more existential way.

Like really, who cares? Who cares if I breastfeed, who cares if I work or not, who cares if they eat wonder bread or wheat bread, it doesn’t matter. My life is so small on the grand scale that its hard not to drop into nihilism. My days are spent on the most meaningless of tasks — laundry, cleaning, sweeping food off the floor, sweeping more food off the floor, Mac n cheese making, too much coffee drinking, trying to “take care of myself” whatever that means, trying not to let my boys watch too much tv, making sure they play outside enough, making sure they’ve eaten so they don’t kill each other, making sure they don’t kill each other anyway. Sometimes it feels degrading. I have a college degree and a brain in my head, and now I’m just a snack bitch.

My husband comes home from work and genuinely cares to know how my day was, and I have nothing to tell him. I did nothing meaningful today.

And yet, without me, the basics needed to run a semi functional home are non existent, and the whole house descends into complete chaos. The kitchen is a disaster, there are toys everywhere, the bathroom floor is inexplicably wet, and no one has anything to wear. I’m reminded of this when I come to the end of a week where I’ve had migraines and have done nothing homemaking related for days.

I’m sure I need to adjust my idea of what “meaningful work” is. There is a whole “finding meaning in homemaking” movement that you don’t have to look that far on the internet to find, and I also grew up in a very stay at home mom filled homeschool culture, but I fall squarely in the “Homemaking is not where I find my fulfillment” camp.

Motherhood is the least fulfilling thing I’ve done in my life.

I realized today, that if I were a man I wouldn’t feel guilty about that. It would almost be assumed that I wouldn’t find my complete fulfillment in parenting. If you read a blog post about how a man found fulfillment not in his role as a parent but though his work you wouldn’t think twice. But if a woman voices that kind of a sentiment, she’s sus.

That doesn’t mean I don’t love my kids though. That doesn’t mean I don’t do my best, and make sure they are playing outside enough, and their nose is wiped, and they have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch on the correctly colored plate.

It means I need something more than motherhood and homemaking to be my best — and that is okay.

In the mean time, I have to go warm up a bottle.