NGL, I’ve Been The Miserable Mom Chappell Roan Is Talking About
But it never had anything to do with my son or being his mother.
Stop the presses — another celebrity has a hot take on motherhood and #MomTok is not happy. Last week, Chappell Roan appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast hosted by Alex Cooper when, about 15 minutes into her interview, Cooper asked whether the pop sensation wants a family one day. And Chappell Roan’s motherhood comments over the next couple of minutes have set the internet ablaze. The sound bite begins with Cooper asking Roan if she’s still close with her friends from high school (the singer is 27 years old). She is, she says, but they “have such different lives.”
“A lot of them are married with children, and they have their own houses. I don’t know when that’s going to happen for me; I don’t know when that’s realistic, if ever,” Roan says. Cooper presses her about whether she wants a family, and Roan’s answer is polarizing: “All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I actually don’t know anyone who’s, like, happy and has children at this age. I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”
Now the internet is crashing out. Some are saying her take is unfair, and that women really can’t express the joys or woes of motherhood without being seen as either homemakers with no career goals or miserable wretches who hate their lives and kind of deserve it — they decided to have kids, after all. Others agree with Chappell and say the mothers they know seem deeply unhappy, too, and have turned into competitive, judgmental people.
Let’s get this out of the way: I’ve been that mom, the one who complains about parenting, being exhausted, and having no time to do the things I want to do. When people ask if we want more kids, I’m quick to vigorously shake my head and declare myself one and done. I’m not upset with Chappell Roan for her take on motherhood. Sure, I’d be super f*cking pissed if my high school best friend went on a podcast and described me as a miserable mother, but that’s neither here nor there. She’s entitled to her own opinion about why she might not want kids, and she’s objectively at least a little bit right.
Parents of young kids are in hell, so much so that, in 2024, the surgeon general issued an advisory about the mental health crisis afflicting American parents. That report does not mince words: Parents are more isolated, overwhelmed, and afraid to raise children today than ever before. But it’s not because they have kids; it’s because they have kids right now, in this country. That was certainly the case for me.
Bringing our son home from the hospital was, as it is for any new parent, a massive adjustment. I had a high-risk pregnancy, then the baby blues, and our son needed a lot of doctor’s visits and experimentation to find the right (expensive) formula. But we had insurance and are a dual-income household, so we got through it OK. Our baby was born in 2021; we fretted my whole pregnancy about me catching COVID, and then waited years before we could even access the vaccine to protect our son. As a freelance writer, I was fortunate to be working from home and able to phase back into things slowly when my son was 3 months old, but 80% of American mothers have no paid maternity leave and are forced back to work much earlier. We also have incredible support from our families when we need child care, a rare and special gift in 2025.
A table from the surgeon general’s report summarizing some of the most common stressors for American parents.
Then there are all the social media comparisons, advice, and entire industries set up to make money on vulnerable new parents. I’ve written extensively about how little we slept the first year of my son’s life, and the mental, emotional, and financial toll it took on our family. Just like Chappell says, I had zero light in my eyes. I griped about the issue to everyone I know at some point. Our baby’s sleep issues drove me to follow wake windows, listen to baseless advice from sleep consultants online, and even hire one IRL, yet nothing would get him to sleep through the night. Infant sleep products and services are a $325 million per year industry, though, and they’re good at drawing in desperate new customers. And that’s just one aspect of baby and toddler care.
Now my son is 4, and he’s fresh out of a phase of 3-year-old tantrums that made me understand why exorcisms were invented. Logically, I knew he was just being little, having massive feelings and a still-barely-developed frontal lobe to reason them through. But when there’s a genocide happening in the world, national security is at risk, and it generally feels like the world is falling apart, a tantrum is still usually the thing that’ll send me over the edge. It’s not the source of my unease, but it’s certainly the loudest issue at hand — and enough to tip the scale when my nervous system is already on edge. Then I yell, and because I’m a good parent in 2025, I’m trying to break the cycle of doing so in my family, so I feel horrendously guilty.
When your kids become school-age, you enjoy another all-American rite of passage: being afraid your kid will get shot at school. You waffle on when they need a phone and whether they can have social media yet, and what it might do to their mental health. It must also be said: My husband and I are white, cisgender, heterosexual people, but the surgeon general’s report clearly states that facing discrimination based on race or gender identity can compound all these other stressors.
It’s so important that we be clear: Parents are in hell, and it has nothing to do with our children. I love everything about my son and being his mom; I feel a bone-deep joy each and every time he tells me something new he learned at school, says something funny, or wraps his still-squishy arms as tight as he can around my neck in a hug. There is nothing he has ever done or will do that will make me unhappy to be his mom. I guarantee Chappell Roan’s friends feel the same way about their children.
What is holding us back and making us mentally ill is the lack of systemic support for parents, and the fact that there looks to be no light at the end of that tunnel. We yearn for the space to enjoy our children to the fullest, but there are so few policies in place to let us do that. So yes, maybe the mothers Chappell Roan knows are having a hard time. It will likely get easier when their kids aren’t so young. But it also, really, has nothing to do with the children at all.
