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A Perth mum’s unvarnished account of motherhood has gone viral, with millions of people around the world reading her brutally honest post about life with a newborn.
Storm Manea-Ellyatt wrote a Facebook post last week describing motherhood as “a sick joke you never understood until this moment”.
In her post, Manea-Ellyatt, whose son Kasier-Lee is five months old, takes aim at the picture-perfect image that many mothers cultivate, and opens up about her own less-than-perfect experience.
She wrote: “The irony [is] that everyone hates it at one point or another, you but you have to remember that hating it out loud is a kick in the face to everyone that would give everything for a moment of “hating it”.
“So you post the photo, you cliché the fuck out of your status because you’re hashtag loving it hashtag mumlife hashtag soblessed and when people ask you, you say with all the vigour of 2 hrs sleep “its honestly the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Since she wrote the post a week ago, Manea-Ellyatthas has been inundated with media requests from around the world, including from US Weekly, the Daily Mail and Cosmopolitan US.
But it’s the messages of support from other mums that have meant the most. “I had a couple in Belgium contact me saying ‘My kids are fully grown now but I wish I’d had this when I was little.’ Another woman said ‘I tried to have a child for 10 years… and now that I have him it’s still a shit show’.”
Manea-Ellyatt believes that the reason the post has struck a chord is that her honesty is rare in today’s social media-obsessed world. “There’s this curated version of what motherhood is like.Even a photo of a child having a tantrum is filtered. When I tried to look for normal people like me I couldn’t find them.”
She hopes her post will help people understand that many women struggle with motherhood in the early weeks and months. “You don’t know who in your group or in your friend circle is going through that but is too scared to say it.”
You can find more of Storm’s writing here.
