Could it be true, moms don’t like motherhood? There’s a new wave of honesty rolling through Instagram and TikTok, and it’s rattling a lot of comment sections. Creators like IG account “marriageishappening” are openly saying what used to stay behind closed doors: motherhood isn’t the equally-shared, soft-focus experience society sells it as, and a lot of women are tired of pretending otherwise. Or, is it, NO ONE HAS EVER ASKED?!?!?

The common thread in these videos isn’t “I don’t love my kids.” It’s that the work of raising them… the planning, the remembering, the emotional labor nobody claps for, all of it, lands almost entirely on moms, even in households where both parents work full-time. Society calls it “just what moms do.” These creators are calling it what it actually is: an unequal load that gets sugarcoated so it’s easier for everyone else to ignore.

And the research backs them up. A University of Bath study found mothers handle roughly 71% of the household’s “mental load”, the invisible planning and organizing work…regardless of how much they earn or how successful their careers are. Fathers, meanwhile, consistently overestimate how much they’re actually contributing. A further look into an article written by Psychology Today, reinforces data that shows this huge imbalance.

That gap has real costs. Studies link the imbalance to higher burnout, depression, and women scaling back their careers to keep the household running.

So when a mom says motherhood isn’t what she signed up for, she’s not exaggerating or looking for sympathy, she’s describing a documented, measurable loss most men never had to even consider. Watch the IG clip by clicking here.